The David Knight Show - Fri 29Mar24 The David Knight Show Unabridged
Episode Date: March 29, 2024Today, on the David Knight Show, guest host Gardner Goldsmith (MRCTV, Liberty Conspiracy) digs further into the conflicting data from the Key Bridge accident and collapse, wondering how Joe Biden coul...d claim there was no sabotage involved when the investigators had not yet arrived or gone through the contents of the Black Box. Gard also welcomes President of the Future of Freedom Foundation, Jacob Hornberger, to discuss immigration, freedom of association, economics, and how central-planning is on full display in the US immigration police state (and government subsidies to help immigrants live in certain places). Then, Gard welcomes Eric Peters, of Eric Peters Autos Dot Com, to discuss his consistently excellent work investigating government attempts to attack the internal combustion engine and our freedom of movement and to choose what sources of energy we want to use! Thank you for listening! Go to www.theDavidKnightShow.com for more, and watch Gardner each M-F with Liberty Conspiracy, at 6 PM, on Rumble, Rokfin, and Gard's X @gardgoldsmithFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHT Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.
Transcript
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Happiness. We all know what it feels like, but sometimes it doesn't come easy. I'm Garvey Bailey,
the host of Happy Enough, a new podcast from The Globe and Mail about our pursuit of happiness.
We know people want to live more fulfilling and positive lives, but how do we actually do that?
Is there a happiness code to crack? From our relationship with technology to whether money can really buy you happiness,
we'll hear from both real people and experts to demystify this thing we're all searching for
and hopefully find ways to be happy enough.
You can find Happy Enough wherever you listen to podcasts. Using free speech to free minds.
You're listening to The David Knight Show.
The David Knight Show.
As the clock strikes 13 on Airstrip One, welcome to the David Knight Show.
I'm Gardner Goldsmith filling in for David today on this good Friday, and I hope that your day has started beautifully. The birds are chirping outside the studio here
and I'm enjoying the blessings of God.
Thanks for joining us on this, the 29th day of March, 2024. We've got a lot to discuss today.
Our guests will be Jacob Hornberger,
the founder and president of the Future Freedom Foundation.
In the 10 o'clock hour and in the 11 o'clock hour, Eric Peters of Eric Peters
Autos will join us as we explore the world and get lessons of freedom.
Wow.
It is a beautiful day out there, isn't it?
Wherever you are, I hope that you can find a beauty there.
And welcome to The David Knight Show.
I'm Gardner Goldsmith. Nicole Smith, blessed to be here with you in the audience on Rockfin, on Rumble, on DLive,
and on David Knight's Twitter slash XFeed Libertarian.
Of course, you can find The David Knight Show at thedavidknightshow.com every day and listen to the show Monday through Friday live at 9 a.m. Eastern Time, straight through to noontime. The best news coverage from the best news man and philosopher, David Knight.
And I'm just delighted to be here with you today, everyone.
You might know my work from MRCTV, and I want to thank all of those folks at the MRCTV offices
just outside of the swamp in Washington for what they do.
Eric Shiner, terrific guy.
I was chatting with him a little bit yesterday via text.
And I look forward to getting your comments inside Rockfin Rumble Chat.
And I'm really looking forward to hearing what you're thinking about some of these stories.
So for the next hour, we're going to do a quick news update,
dig into some of the breaking stories, and reflect a little bit on Good Friday.
I have something special that I put together for you today because I was looking forward to filling in for David.
And I want to thank David and Travis and the entire Knight family for being so gracious to me and to you, the audience, and just showing such incredible
affection and devotion to principle. They're just terrific people. And chatted with David a little
bit via text yesterday and Travis as well. And I hope that they're having a terrific day today.
Absolutely. And I hope you are too on this, the 29th day of March, 2024. Let's see what's on tap on the program today, everybody,
for the David Knight Show, 3-29-24.
Wow, we're almost headed into April.
I don't do April Fool's jokes anymore, that's for sure.
But on April 2nd, I'm supposed to see Adam Ant play live.
I hope I can make it.
Hope I can make the show.
As well as Dave Wakeling from
the English Beat. So that'll be a lot of fun. Boy, what a great team up that'll be. Well, I'm looking
forward to today. A very special day for Christians. Today on the David Knight Show, we're going to be
covering a lot of information. The bridge collapsed. And remember yesterday, I asked the question of,
is it a constitutional collapse
as well? Well, last night on my Liberty Conspiracy show, and I should mention I do a live show every
Monday through Friday at 6 p.m., a breaking news story show where we break apart the breaking news
and derive long standing lessons for freedom out of that. I've lectured in political philosophy
and economics and things like
that, take a very strong pro-liberty stance on things. And so we take a lot of these news stories
and we try to drive some longstanding intellectual ammunition that we can then apply to future
instances where there might be something very similar. And then we look back at history,
talk to great people like Tony Arterburn, who has an amazing sense of history and great wit.
And in fact, from Tony Arterburn's wit, we're deriving one of the terms that I started to use last night about the bridge collapse.
We'll talk about the bridge collapse. We'll talk about whether or not there is a narrative collapse or it's just bad management from, of course, the central authority in Washington, D.C.
Because everybody knows collectivism is great.
Oh, my goodness.
I shouldn't laugh about the situation coming out of that terrible tragedy.
But what can you do?
It's another example of really, really bad management.
Or is it an example of something more nefarious after the fact i'm not talking
about how the bridge collapse happened with the with the shipping container ship hitting the
bridge but i'm talking about the way that the politicians are handling this and we saw some
of that as politicians jumped on and immediately decided they were going to send federal funds over
there where there's nothing constitutional to do that we're also going to take a look in this hour at Good Friday. It's the good and the bad, okay? The good, the bad,
and maybe the ugly, but we're going to try to look at the good. We're going to look at Good Friday,
not so good for some cultural Marxists. They don't seem to like Good Friday. I know,
you might be shocked. I don't want to be doing something, but maybe you too are not too surprised.
We'll look at the Russians versus the deep staters on the Moscow attack as the Russian spokeswoman recalls the U.S. working with terror cells.
And we might get into the Canada made the courts and more, plus perhaps the Supreme Court on the MAGA defamation suit. But I might
put in a couple other things there. So let's check out what's happening right now with you.
Feel free to drop your messages inside Rockfin and Rumble Chat. It would be great to see you.
Let me know that everything's going all right for you, if the sound is good and so on and so forth.
Want to make sure that that's all set for you. And I want to say hi to everyone in the chat.
Jason Barker is there of Knights of the Storm, of course,
does great work and is working with freeworld.fm.
They are all just putting in their own time.
It's just something where they are creating,
thanks to Billy Ray Valentine and Tony Arterburn,
they're creating an audio platform for people who want
to speak about freedom. And Jason Barker has been very, very helpful in helping other people get
into that to be able to get their, technologically, to be able to get their shows broadcasting live
on freeworld.fm. So if you want to listen in your car, it's very easy and it doesn't take as much
buffering. You can just listen to the audio stream. So thank you very much listen in your car, it's very easy and it doesn't take as much buffering. You can just listen to the audio stream.
So thank you very much, Jason Barker, for what you do in Nights of the Storm and, of course, in the Foxhole.
Great research on every one of his shows.
Check out Jason Barker.
It's RealJasonBarker on Twitter slash X.
Steve Swan, thanks for being there.
And Harps from Australia.
Greetings, mate.
Good to see you as
well. Dougalug. And boy, I'm just so pleased to see so many fine, fine folks in the audience out
there. And yes, Jason, I wore my red shirt in honor of you today and your Star Trek interest,
because yeah, people might not know, but I did. I won't say I did some time. I had a great time working in the offices of Star Trek Voyager.
So it was a really good time.
We'll check in with Rumble Chat in just a little while.
Let's find out what we're going to be talking about for our first story.
Now, when I do Liberty Conspiracy, Monday through Friday at 6 p.m.
on Rockfin and Rumble, just look it up or go to my Twitter slash X at Guard Goldsmith.
I often open the show with the news flash.
And so I turn to, as I mentioned on David's show yesterday,
I turn to this little clip sometimes, not all the time,
but almost every time as part of our montage for the news flash.
It's from a little film that I did with some friends called Skippy Binderman.
And you can see it on YouTube.
And yes, that is me.
I am the one in the white body paint with the white tuxedo and the black tie and the black wig.
It was a spoof of cartoon superheroes, along with my friend Spike, who played Alan Granny Lickerspindle.
And supposedly we were masters of disguise
who could go anywhere because no one would recognize us.
So it's time, one and all.
It's time for the News Flash.
Yes? Oh, hello.
Hello, we're Mary's parents.
Oh, well, good morning, fellas.
Hold it a second. Mary's parents burned Oh, well, come on in, fellas. Hold it a second.
Mary's parents burned to death last year.
Wait a minute.
I know you guys.
You're from the newsflash.
Flash.
Ah.
Savior of the universe.
Oh, man.
What's on tap first?
Well, we're going to go with a quick warfare update.
There's some important information that I think is important.
I'd like to give it to you, get your thoughts, and maybe, again, break apart some of these stories to get some longstanding lessons about history or perhaps hypocrisy on the part of the United States.
I know, I know, a shocker on the part of the U.S. government. Yeah. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
Say it again, y'all.
What?
Look out.
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.
Listen to me.
Oh, yes, yes.
I would have enjoyed to see Edwin Starr.
What a voice.
What a voice.
I mean, even more soulful than the godfather.
Happiness.
We all know what it feels like.
But sometimes it doesn't come easy.
I'm Garvey Bailey, the host of Happy Enough,
a new podcast from The Globe and Mail about our pursuit of
happiness. We know people want to live more fulfilling and positive lives, but how do we
actually do that? Is there a happiness code to crack? From our relationship with technology to
whether money can really buy you happiness, we'll hear from both real people and experts to demystify this thing we're all
searching for and hopefully find ways to be happy enough. You can find Happy Enough wherever you
listen to podcasts. Himself, yes, indeed. I got to say, I would have loved to have seen everyone start. That would
have been really, really, really cool. So let's talk about these stories. And of course, do let
me know inside the chat if you're getting the audio, if the tech is looking good and so on and
so forth. And thank you very much. I really appreciate your feedback. Rumble, we'll check
in with Rumble Chat in a little while, but let me give you a couple of these stories I've been watching and get your feedback on these as well.
First off, let's look at antiwar.com.
This is a positive.
So, and this is not the first time this has happened.
You'll see this from antiwar.com, the great and amazing yeoman's work of Dave DeCamp.
State Department official resigns over Biden's support for Gaza slaughter.
Anne Scheline, who served as a foreign affairs officer in the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, has resigned from her post.
And she wrote in an op-ed for CNN, of all things, amazingly, for the past year,
I worked for the office devoted to promoting human rights in the Middle East. I believe
strongly in the mission and in the important work of that office. Well, it'd be nice if that were
constitutional, but pretty much not. However, as a representative of a government that is directly
enabling what the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be a genocide in Gaza, such work has become almost impossible.
Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the State Department of State, she wrote. And oftentimes, as we know,
especially as we have seen exemplified with such stark clarity under people like Hillary Clinton
and John Kerry, the State Department is a facilitator of the CIA, the Atlantic Council,
and NATO in overthrowing nation states, starving people like those in Iraq, as we saw with Madeleine Albright,
and causing havoc all around the world by communicating and working directly with
terrorist ties everywhere. Just look at the groups that are involved with the United States as it
occupies a third of Syria. Sheline said she did not initially intend to make her reservation public,
but did so after being encouraged by colleagues in the State Department.
Quote, When I started to tell colleagues of my decision to resign, the response I heard repeatedly was, please speak for us.
She's 25 years old and she is the third now just in the past few, to resign from the Biden administration on this particular issue.
So just that is a positive.
But, of course, there are some negatives.
Let's go with a little bit of the negative the hypocrisy of the united states government when it comes to their position
on israel gaza dave to camp children and uh now the state of things that there's been the saudi
houthi ceasefire but now the u.s is bombing yemen and in a bombing campaign that's not supported by
the saudis they don't want anything to do with it. And new U.S. sanctions are now blocking a peace deal in Yemen. There's that. And there's the next story. This
next story is about the United States smearing the author of an Israeli genocide report and claiming,
of course, that that person is anti-Semitic. Let's go with it. Dave DeCamp.
So I'm sure she's not happy about that as well. All right. So the next one here, the U.S. smears the author of an Israel genocide report as anti-Semitic. So the State Department on Wednesday
suggested the author of a U.N. human rights report that says there are reasonable
grounds to believe Israel's committing genocide is anti-Semitic as a way to dismiss the allegations.
So the author of this report, Francesca Albanese, she's a UN special rapporteur to the occupied
Palestinian territories. She presented this report to the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday.
She said, quote,
Israel has committed three acts of genocide
with the intent causing serious bodily or mental harm
to members of the group,
deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, And they definitely have done that considering all the assaults on hospitals.
And if you remember, they actually left babies to die.
I forget what hospital that was at, but just horrific NICU babies that were left to die and they were found decomposing.
I mean, in the incubator.
This is very heavy stuff, obviously, but I want to make sure that I cover it.
And by the way, those of you who might not be familiar with, you know, watching my show or whatever, my last name is Goldsmith.
And I attended Boston University, which is like, you know, 90 some percent school population of Jewish people.
But I'm not Jewish. It's an old English name like Naylor or Smith or Farmer or anything like that.
It's one of those professional names sort of thing. I'm English and Irish. And I joked around
the other day. I said, yeah, so on St. Patrick's Day, I yell at myself in front of a mirror
for my own terrorism and my own imposition of government.
But I want to turn now to a clip that I think will show you the fatuousness of the U.S. administration.
And this is an example of many U.S. administrations. I hope, would recognize that Donald Trump was not exactly the peacemaker that they thought or heard that he was as he occupied a third of Syria and instituted and conducted extrajudicial murders of drone strikes all over the world.
So let's take a look at Mark Miller.
I want to show this to you, some video that I've collected and make sure that I can get this together.
Yeah, here we go. Now, I don't know who this man is. He's a reporter who often speaks back against White House spokespeople.
But I want to show you the U.S. made weapons that our tax money and future generations are paying for
from the United States. They could just stop sending them weapons. They could conform to their
promise to uphold the U.S. Constitution, for goodness sake. On Good Friday, at least we could
ask for that. At least we could ask for a modicum of honesty from those people. But do we get it?
No, we don't. But there are some reporters who are willing to
ask these people, well, you have all these agreements. Why do you have all these agreements
if you don't abide by them and everything turns out to be a paper tiger with all of your
agreements? Why is it that they continue to give weapons? And again, I'll remind folks, if you
thought that the budget that they passed last
week from the House and the Senate was bad, just remember again that it includes an automatic
$3.8 billion to go to Israel in mostly weapons. In addition to the fact that, again, those people
who are always wearing their hearts on their sleeves with our money and our children's money, who send aid everywhere all around the world for food and things like that.
As David Crockett noted in 1830 in his speech, not yours to give as charitable as they might make it look, as we mentioned with Jacob Hornberger's piece on
social security recently, an excellent piece, it's not charitable to use somebody else's money
to give it to a third party. That's not charity. It's called theft. You're just propping yourself
up to the third party, which is essentially what politicians do all the time, of course, right?
I'm not telling you anything new, but let's make a new spin on this because now on the contemporary current news side of this, we see that the United States Relief Agency that has been giving the Palestinians food for years and is the bulk of their food support as the Israelis have moved in decade after decade and taken more and more of that land there and shut those people in and now
is not even opening up the gates for the food to come in on the ground is delaying things by
building this dock this port when they could just open up the gates on the ground but instead not
only are they not opening the gates they're killing people at the gates and they're killing
un food workers there well now the united, in addition to giving the almost $4 billion
as it has given last year and the year before
and the year before and so on and so forth,
they're also not sending that food aid money
to the UN relief agency to give the food aid to Palestine.
Now, far be it from me,
but I think many sensible people look at that scenario.
They're looking at those puzzle pieces in front of them on the table under the lights,
and they're saying, hmm, I think that last puzzle piece maybe gives me a hint that the
United States is facilitating genocide.
Maybe the United States is facilitating Israel sweeping the remainder of the innocent women
and children who are there out of Gaza.
And as I mentioned, if people want to use the argument that Israel can continue to attack a land it already occupies to recover hostages, and we'll see a little bit of this coming from Mark Miller, of course, from Washington. But if they make that argument, then as I mentioned, for years, year after year after
year, the Israeli government has apprehended and held hundreds, hundreds a year of women and teenage
kids and people they never charge with any crime. Again, extrajudicial kidnapping. So if people are willing to give the Israeli government, the occupying force, a pass to say, oh, yeah, go ahead, do whatever you want. In the meantime, even the Israeli forces say, well, if we kill a few of the hostages who have escaped and tried to reach the IDF with
their hands up. They've killed them. They've killed the people they're supposed to rescue
for the greater good. You got to break a few eggs to make that collectivist omelet, don't you?
Right? So it's a really troubling thing to see when the United States could stop this in a few
days by saying no more weapons, because the bulk of the weapons that they're using in that area are U.S. made weapons.
So let's turn to U.S. double talk on Israel, Gaza.
And again, I don't know who this reporter is.
I wish I could mention to you his name, but you might have seen him before.
He usually pushes back on a lot of this double talk.
Here we go.
So what do you expect now to happen as a result of the passage of this resolution? Do you expect
that Israel is going to announce a ceasefire?
Do you expect that Hamas is going to release hostages?
I'm glad you mentioned that because one of the things that we have objected to
for some time is that most of the people that call for a ceasefire, we believe, are calling for Israel to unilaterally stop operations and not calling for Hamas to agree to a ceasefire where they would release hostages.
Well, I think it goes both ways, doesn't it?
It could.
Wait, wait, wait.
But the resolution today is a non-binding resolution.
Okay, so what's the point?
Why did you abstain?
Why didn't you beat us?
So I think that separate and apart from this resolution,
we have active, ongoing negotiations to try to achieve what this resolution calls for,
which is an immediate ceasefire and the release of hostages.
I can't say that this resolution is going to have any impact on those negotiations.
But those negotiations are ongoing.
They've been ongoing over the weekend, and they've made progress.
So I don't expect you to answer this now, but to me, you just stick this in your pocket.
If that's the case, what the hell is the point of the UN Security Council?
So we think it plays an important role.
It does, even though its action does absolutely nothing.
And that you're going to get what you would like to see, not out of the UN, but out of discussions.
So we believe it's important that the UN speak, the UN Security Council speak on matters of international security. It's why we've been
engaged in this process, why we thought we were going to have a successful vote on Friday that
Russia and China unfortunately and quite cynically vetoed. But I do believe that ultimately, if we
were able to achieve a ceasefire and the release of hostages is going to come not through a UN
process, but through the process with which we've been engaged, yes, in Doha.
Unbelievable. Okay, so talk about cynical.
The resolution they're discussing there was introduced by the United States as non-binding just for cover.
Then the United States didn't vote for it. they stood out as not voting. Okay. And they have disapproved
and shot down other resolutions. And again, the point here is that the UN is the United States
globalist puppet. As he says, what's the point of the UN Security Council? Well, the point is,
of course, it's an artifice for the United States to be able to do and British authorities for the globalists to do essentially anything they want to and build up a superstructure, which they have built up since the end of World War II for interfering in all sorts of nation states and then claiming that when those nation states say, please leave us alone, that they're the bad guys. It is, of course, it's just it's the gaslighting writ large globally of what these people intend.
They have to continue with these offices.
They have to continue with these rituals of statism all over the place, even as the United States continues to send these weapons out. And as I mentioned, David Crockett in his 1830 Not Yours to Give
speech noted that the United States, forget about not even weapons. I mean, that's like the apex of
it. Even the stuff that people would think would be much more humanitarian in the food aid and all
those types of things. Again, just a reminder to the people who go to Washington, D.C., who are
typically over my left shoulder, you swear an oath to the United States Constitution.
There's no enumerated power granted in it, if you want to call it power, because the United States Constitution, as nice as it is that it has the so-called checks in there and promises that you won't do certain things, you skirt that.
You flout it all the time.
So I didn't sign up for it but at least you could
try to uphold your oath please come on stop using me like a punching bag okay so they promised to
swear they swear an oath to abide by the constitution as do the soldiers and of course
they neglect it they think they're doing something for the nation state rather than
the constitution john mccain when he was running for president, said, when I got into the military, I swore an
oath to defend the country. No, John, you swore an oath to protect and defend the United States
constitution and to follow constitutional orders. So, for example, going to Vietnam was
unconstitutional. Sending weapons, even sending soldiers to Vietnam, unconstitutional.
No declaration of war. The only other option is letters of mark and reprisal to hire mercenaries.
So, John, you were breaching your oath when you agreed to go there. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to say
that. Then we've got the weapons, even the food, even the humanitarian aid, as they say, as David Crockett noted, when he was in Congress in his second term, he said, during my first term, I made a mistake and we saw a fire in Georgetown.
This is his famous not yours to give speech. I saw a fire in Georgetown along with other congressmen.
He was from Tennessee at the time, a congressman from Tennessee. And he said, we ran
over to try to help. And it was a total, total loss. The couple of buildings, families displaced.
So he said, the next day we went to Congress and we put together a bill to gather a certain amount
of money, a sum of money to help those families rebuild and so on, giving them places to stay.
He said later when he
was campaigning back in Tennessee, he was walking along a farmer's fence and he happened to measure
his gate so they could walk near the farmer as the farmer was behind his horse taking his plow.
The farmer stopped. He said to the farmer, I don't know if you know me. I'm one of those
unfortunate fellows they call politicians. My name is, he says, oh, I know who you are. You're Colonel Crockett or Mr.
Crockett or Congressman Crockett. I think it might've said Colonel Crockett. He said,
he said, I know who you are and I'm sorry, this is no offense to you, but I can't vote for you
because you broke your oath. You have no power to do what you think is charitable with other
people's money. You haven't amended the Constitution.
You haven't granted yourself that power.
And again, there's a real problem there, I think, philosophically, when politicians can say, hey, let's get this amendment going to grant us more power.
And yes, they have a process where other factions of government, the states, will then approve or disapprove.
So it does sort of put
in some attenuation there. But again, it's all versions of the state. And a lot of the governors
and state legislatures obviously will feed off of whatever Washington can give them.
So David Crockett said, you know, you're right to this man. He said, you know,
if you will help me and maybe appear with me in a couple of places, I promise you I will never do that again.
I would like to do some speeches about my mistake.
And he did.
And the man attended with him. because at the time they were trying to vote to give the widows of some veterans in his second term a package beyond what the veterans had been promised when they entered the military.
And so he said, we can't do that. We already gave the veterans and their widows what was promised.
We can't add more to that because that runs against our oath.
So good for David Crockett. You know, it was great to see that he was doing that sort
of thing. And it's a good historical reminder, I think, to tell us about these things. Now,
I do want to mention one other thing when it comes to, you know, slandering people and so on.
And again, you know, the idea that it's a cynical ploy by the Chinese and the Russians
to oppose something. Well, maybe they
opposed it because it was non-binding. Talk about cynical. You introduce a non-binding resolution,
then you don't vote for it. You continue to be the main funder of the weapons coming out of
Washington, D.C., Mr. Miller. And then you have the gall to claim again in a gaslighting way
that your political opponents worldwide, China and Russia
are the bad guys. I see. Okay. Well, here's one more example of some of the stuff that the pop
media has been feeding us. Here is a woman who made numerous appearances on CNN. She has been
exposed as a grifter and a fraud. This comes from the gray zone on March 25th.
Her name was Kochav Elkayam Levy,
the Israeli lawyer at the center of the campaign
accusing Hamas of systemic sexual violence.
And on October 7th,
she now stands accused by Israeli media
of scamming donors and spreading misinformation.
And the gray zone team says the allegations appeared just days
after Al-Qaim Levy received the prestigious Israel Prize.
She's a founder of the so-called Civil Commission
on October 7th crimes by Hamas against women and children.
She's a lawyer.
Al-Kayyam Levy has been a go-to source for Western media.
You saw our image there, if you're just listening,
and that was a still shot of her on CNN.
Media organizations pushing the narrative that Palestinian militants carried out sexual assault
on a massive and systemic basis when they attacked Israel.
Al-Kaim Levy has starred as in a factually challenged CNN special on the topic narrated
by the fervently pro-Israel host Jake Tapper.
Now, this is not to minimize the death and the attack against civilians that the Hamas militants committed on October 7th.
But I think it's important to recognize the ways, again, to use the term that Mark Miller used,
the cynical ways that Western, especially United States propagandists, have been pushing the buttons on sexual violence and women's rights and spinning that into it when, A, there's no evidence that they have provided, and B, it shows, again, the cynicism of their ploy to think that somehow they have to make it sound somehow even darker than what was committed,
that they have to cater and somehow try to play favorites with women seriously.
So she was in a factually challenged CNN special narrated by, as they say here, the pro-Israel
host Jake Tapper. And there was one time when Jake Tapper did mention
that he has colleagues who have family members who were being killed by the Israeli forces in Gaza.
So he did a good job on that. But he identified her as an expert in human rights law who organized
a civil community to document violence. Well, the publication Haaretz featured Al-Kayyam Levy, and Haaretz is not
super bad. They're not terrible, to use a sort of a high school term. They're not super bad,
or the name of a movie. Pretty funny, but raunchy movie. Haaretz featured Al-Kayyam Levy as the
subject of a puff piece, which misleadingly claimed that her work, quote, presents a horrifying
picture that leaves no room for doubt.
October 7th, Hamas terrorists systematically carried out acts of rape and sexual violence.
And of course, on December 6th, 2023, members of the White House National Security Council,
you probably detect a note of irony in my voice, White House National Security Council. If you're just listening in audio, you definitely probably detected going with your ears. Security Council and assistant to gather testimony and document evidence of the events of October 7th
and develop a comprehensive accounting of gender-based violence committed by Hamas.
Hillary Clinton traveled the same rhetorical path at Columbia,
and that was one of the days when protesters stood up and called her a warmonger,
and she had blood on her hands, as Killing Joke might say, or as Shakespeare might say. And absolutely. Well stark denial and the increasing tide of anti-Semitism, she declared.
Well, as I mentioned, when I was at Boston University, with my last name being Goldsmith,
a lot of the kids there thought that I was Jewish. Most of the kids there were not practicing
Jews. They were the sort of, you hear the Ashkenazi Jews.
They were statist Zionist Jewish kids.
And I would hear things,
and I might've mentioned this
when I filled in for David a couple of weeks ago.
I would hear things from them about the Palestinians,
that they were animals.
And when I spoke up about it,
they started to say, what are you, a self-hating Jew?
And I said, well, first, I'm not Jewish.
Like, oh, well, now you're anti-Semitic.
Any way they could get around actually discussing an issue.
Just, you know, blackballing, painting someone, trying to use character assassination rather
than dealing with the facts.
And you say to yourself, I would say to myself, why do I bother talking to these people?
The reason I had to keep doing it was because of the power that these people wielded propagandistically that I would see in the media.
It was ridiculous.
I remember a friend of mine from college, Lina Mata, was a Christian Lebanese.
And she was working on a documentary in the late 80s about what Israel was doing there.
And it was amazing.
It was amazing to see some of the pushback that I would get at Boston University.
Very, very strange.
And some of the things people would reveal to me when they thought that I was Jewish, it was inexplicable.
But now, you know, it really is manifesting itself now here in, you know here in this terrible destruction. Well, three days after she got the
award, Israel's largest newspaper, Ynet, published a damning expose accusing Al-Kyem Levy of ripping
off major donors, including a member of the Biden administration, spreading fake Hamas atrocity tales
and failing to deliver on her promise of a major report about sexual violence on October 7th.
The paper wrote, quote, people have disassociated themselves from her because her research is inaccurate.
An Israeli government official. Oh, this is. Yeah. The newspaper told Ynet.
After all, the whole story is that they want to accuse us of spreading fake news.
And her methodology was neither good nor accurate.
So he's saying, look, if we're trying to get news stories out there, at least we could try to be accurate.
And she's harming our cause.
Government officials were particularly incensed that Al-Qaim Levy spread discredited claims that a Hamas militant cut.
And sorry for the terrible footage, the terrible visuals here in your mind that might pop up.
Cut a fetus from a pregnant woman before raping the woman.
A lie first spread by confirmed fraudster Yossi Landau.
That's a lie first spread by Yossi Landau of the scandal-stained Zaka, Z-A-K-A organization. Quote, the story about the pregnant
woman who had her stomach cut open, a story that was proven to be untrue, and she spread it in the
international press, the official complaint. So it's much like the incubator story from the
United States trying to invade Iraq, right? Absolutely. Well, let's get to a little bit
more here, folks. Let's talk a little bit about the Ukraine story, the Ukraine narrative.
Just briefly, I want to turn to the bombing and some very good information from Judge
Andrew Napolitano. I've um gotta refresh this the the computer is
going wild here so uh let's make sure i can get this done for you okay here we go um i think
you'll like this andrew napolitano on his judging freedom podcast very good podcast and he has
excellent guests every day just over and over again. He's got great podcasts. But I want to turn to, and of course, you'll probably find her familiar, Maria Zakharova.
She is the spokesperson for the Putin administration.
As Judge Napolitano and his guests roll into this.
All right.
Here's Maria Zakharova, number 19, Chris, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman yesterday.
In order to deflect suspicion from this very collective West from Washington, London, Berlin, which literally discussed in direct text, as I said, possible tourist attacks in our country, Paris and other NATO
countries, they had to find something, anything, something, some explanation.
So they resorted to ISIS, took this Trump card out of their sleeve, so to speak, and
the White House, together with the state
department declared at the maid stat that ukraine had nothing to do with it end quote
on the basis of what data on the basis of what information did they draw that conclusion
it is completely unclear only one thing is clear they They began to excuse the Kiev regime in order to excuse themselves because everyone understands perfectly well that there is no independent Kiev regime without Western financial support and military aid to this regime. to say uh over at my liberty conspiracy show monday through friday six o'clock uh at rumble
and rock pin and so on and my twitter feed if you're looking for it x it's at guard goldsmith
g-a-r-d goldsmith um but uh i was mentioning how the united states narrative that they warned the Russians, as I read on my show and I tried to mention to people, and also has been noted on Redacted by a former CIA intel expert.
There's actually, the U.S. has provided no evidence that they warned the Russians about this.
That's their claim, that they warned the Russians about this. That's their claim, that they warned the Russians about this.
And it's very unclear whether they did or they did not.
And so there's still a lot of speculation about that attack in Moscow.
But one thing is certain, as I mentioned, in late 2013,
the United States was involved with the Maidan coup,
and Victoria Nuland was intimately
involved with working with Nazis from the Slovodov party. Ole Tiannebach became part of their
coalition government in early 2014 as one of the outside people heard in her conversation with
Jeffrey Pyatt that was recorded. That's the infamous F the EU conversation from 2014. But a lot of the wrongdoing started in late November, early December of 2013
after the re-election of Yanukovych. And they wanted to separate Russia from Ukraine. They
wanted to try to stop Russia from being able to export its energy exports through Crimea. And of course, once that coup was established, for about almost 10 years,
the Nazis who were backed and the Azov battalion who were backed by the Ukrainian government,
backed by the United States government, backed by billions of dollars, they not only continued to
conduct training and things like that, they slaughtered thousands of people in that area.
So just wanted to bring that up with, I think, some questions, some major questions that still
remain about the veracity of what the United States government is telling people. Now, I want
to turn just briefly to some questions about narratives about, as I mentioned before, thanks
to Tony Arterburn yesterday on the David Knight
show, the Epstein Bridge. Because as we noted at the start of the show yesterday, when I got to
fill in for David here on the David Knight show, the story about the United States government
coming out two hours after the shipping container ship hit the support pylon of the key bridge and caused the bridge to collapse and loss of life there.
And that seems to have fallen apart because they claimed right off the bat that there was no terrorist tie to it.
Well, let's check out some of the footage that they got yesterday, because strangely, this footage, they only
got the footage when they arrived there about a day and a half after the United States government
said, well, we've concluded it wasn't a terrorist attack.
Now, I'm not trying to cast asp dispersions to say that it was a terrorist
attack, that it was hacking. Laura Logan has said that. She says that many of her inside advisors
that she knows in Washington say that it was a sophisticated computer hack and so on. We had that
time period where they went to check the black box and the black box suddenly had a breach of a couple minutes,
just like the tapes of Nixon, just like the cameras for Epstein.
And so yesterday, Tony Arterburn of Wise Wolf Gold and Silver Exchange,
Tony Arterburn happened to mention that it's sort of like Epstein.
And I said, yeah, it's sort of like Nixon.
I'm like, yep.
So perhaps now people will call this the Epstein Bridge And I said, yeah, sort of like Nixon. I'm like, yep. So perhaps now people will
call this the Epstein bridge. I don't know. Perhaps that's a little bit too light when you
think about loss of life and things like that. But there is some strange information. This is
the NTSB as they actually confirmed that they only just arrived more than 36 hours after the Biden
administration claimed they knew everything about it.
They say, hey, we got there. We got to check it out. Well, then how did you know that there was
no terrorism? The operations and engineering group was able to board the vessel last night
and they did a walkthrough of the vessel, including the bridge and the engine room. They were looking for other electronic components, any sort of downloadable recorders, any sort of
cameras, any sort of CCTV. They did not find any of those things, but that search continues.
Okay, well, here's a bit more information.
I want to minimize this for you a little bit here.
And we ran through some of the information last night on the show and a little bit yesterday.
And it shows that the ship was still making seven knots at 129 in the morning.
The moment that the VDR recording that many people saw began recording the audible sounds of the
elution. I don't know. The noise continued until 129.33, and the pilot made a VHF call to report
the bridge collapse just shortly thereafter. Now, a couple of the things that I want to bring up
here. Let's go to a little bit more of what she had to say as some of what Laura Logan had said right off the bat is confirmed here. Here we go.
The cargo manifest fest, we did bring in one of NTSB's senior hazmat investigators today
to begin to look at the cargo and the cargo manifest. He was able to identify 56 containers of hazardous materials.
That's 764 tons of hazardous materials,
mostly corrosives, flammables,
and some miscellaneous hazardous materials, class nine.
Okay, all righty.
Well, all right, That's not so good.
But of course, and I hate to make light of this because as we know, it's going to have serious ramifications for the supply chain and so on.
And goodness knows that, again, it's another situation where people are overlooking systematically the areas where the United States government,
according to the Constitution, is supposed to have something to do with it and the areas where the United States government's not supposed to have anything to do with anything. OK, so handing
money over to the state of Maryland or claiming control to rebuild the bridge, it's just not in
their Constitution. And, you know, this sort of fatuous nonsense from these people to do this sort of thing really is something I hope people can call out. And, you know, even in a way, having the
information and the ability to give it to other people is actually something that one can celebrate
and find some pleasure in being able to do that, to say, you know, I actually have a couple pieces of
deeper information that I'd like to relate to you, my friend. Did you know that there's nothing in
the Constitution that gives them this power? You know, as we mentioned yesterday, there are only
three forms of land that the government, the federal government is supposed to be able to
control, not national parks, as much as people might like them. And that doesn't allow people
to show whether they actually want the land to be pristine or nice or anything like that.
It's got to be up to people with private property.
Now, on the constitutional level, that bridge is supposed to be controlled by the state of Maryland and then the people within it.
I would like to pare it down even further to pure property rights with no taking of my neighbor's money, no parasitism in any way.
I'd like to have voluntary
interaction. But as far as the Constitution goes, going back to the colonials and their revolution
and what they came up with, and yes, the Constitution was a usurpation of the Articles
of Confederation, which was much more decentralized. And I don't think we would be
encountering so many of these problems if they were still under just the
articles. But obviously the articles could not stand against the machinations of people like
Alexander Hamilton who wanted to centralize things. So I think it's an opportunity to spread
information about what those founders actually put together, at least with the constitution.
But of course, there are a lot of powers that work against these things.
And so I just want to show you a couple things on Good Friday that I think you might find
interesting. This comes from Taryn Rose Mandelberg of my friends at MRCTV, my co-workers at MRCTV.
Fairfax, Virginia Board of Supervisors celebrates transgender over Jesus. This year, Easter falls
on one of the left's favorite made-up holidays, Transgender Visibility Day. Washington examiner
summarized this move in Fairfax County in Northern Virginia by saying that members are, quote,
sending a message to Christians that they do not matter as they turn one of their holiest days into a celebration of an ideology that undermines the church's core convictions.
Chairman Jeff McKay announced the following after the board unanimously decided to hijack Easter and instead celebrate yet another made-up holiday for people
who have a delusional sense of identity. Quote, as an elected official, it should be our moral
responsibility to stand up for all people that we represent, not just the people we like or the
people we agree with. End quote. So she says, so you mean to tell me that you'll stand up for people who are living a lie, but not stand up for who created you, really? And the Washington Examiner brought up
a great point when it insisted that the Fairfax area could have chosen literally any other day
to honor the transgender folk, especially considering the area is overtly progressive and accepting of the alphabet mafia.
I think that's a very good point. And I would just bring up this point. This is, of course,
the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy of the commons states that anything that is commonly run,
not privately owned, will see everybody arguing over how that's going to be managed. And of course,
now with inclusivity
out there and cultural Marxism coming from the Frankfurt School on with Mancus and so many of
the others who brought their ideas of Marxism into the culture, and many people think that Marx was
just pure economics. He also was cultural because his disruption of things came by leveraging the resentment people had from the old feudal class system that was now being supplanted by the Industrial Revolution, but still seeing favorites being played inside, especially the British Parliament, with special acts of Parliament. the parliament started to hand favors to certain still royally connected people or politically
connected people. Marx was able to utilize that for the common people to say, you see,
it's the business owner who's bad. It's the bad guy. It's capitalism. That's not capitalism.
That's fascism. Or as Adam Smith might say, that's mercantilism. That is cronyism,
crony so-called capitalism, not real free markets.
But Marx utilized that to gin up the hatred and really push out his warmed over Rousseauianism to steal private property from people using the government.
So anytime that the government runs some sort of property, you're going to see that everybody's going to argue over it. Now, again,
this is not to poo-poo anybody's claim about traditional American Christianity or anything
like that, and at least decentralization within small towns or counties or things like that,
that's much more preferable. But the lesson of philosophy, the lesson of logic, the lesson of economics, all of these things, all of those lessons come together to tell us that anything, anything that has the state, the pole is touching it, will include people who are having their income, their work taken from them, siphoned off for some reason.
And so they're going to want to have a say in how it's done.
I'm not saying that that's good or bad. I'm just saying that that is functional. That is the way that it is. And it's
actually dysfunctional. It's the way it dysfunctions, you might say. And I just want to give you a quick
reminder, everybody, of course, of the Vatican. Because the Vatican, during this Holy Week turned off lights for Earth Hour
to promote respect for Mother Earth a number of days ago.
That story from, of course, LifeSite News.
Please visit them because they've often been shadow banned
and torn asunder by a lot of the woke, the Google search manipulation,
YouTube, things like that. LifeSite was pulled
off of YouTube. And so you'll see, of course, the Vatican getting all earth mothery. However,
while we have the opportunity and in about five minutes, our guest Jacob Hornberger is going to
join us from the Future of Freedom Foundation, one of the absolute best institutes that you'll ever find for reading about economics and philosophy and freedom.
Absolutely terrific.
I hope you watch Jacob and Richard Ebeling every week on YouTube over at the Future of Freedom Foundation's channel.
Because they have amazing discussions about great heroes in economics.
Frederick Bastier, F.A. Hayek,
Bumble Burke, so many good, Carl Menger, awesome, awesome people.
I want to give you a little something for Good Friday right now.
And this is something that is near and dear to my heart because I've gotten to see this person live a number of times.
And I've gotten to see him appear with his daughter.
This is a little something for Good Friday everybody. This is Andrea Bocelli and his daughter
singing a song you might know, Alleluia. sicura sentiamo facciamo una canzone insieme?
si
allora ci sediamo
vediamo un po' se a babbo
se babbo si ricorda ancora qualche accordo
sei pronta?
si
andiamo Well, I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
Well, you don't really care for Muley Jr.
Well, it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fourth, the four, the fifth, the mighty four, the major lift, the baffled king composing Hallelujah.
Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah. Alleluia, alleluia
La fede mia mi abbandonò
Si perse ma si ritrovò
Perché smarrito sempre la cercai.
Bellezza, incanto e nostalgia ferirono la mente mia
che in lacrime gridava un'alleluia. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Il santo nome tuo dirò
Un nome che oramai non ho
Aura che risuoni dentro me
Di luce esplode
la poesia
come una
sacra sinfonia
che intona
per il mondo
un alleluia
alleluia
alleluia Aleluya, Aleluya, Aleluya, Aleluya. Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah
I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool ya
And even though it all went wrong I'll stand before the Lord of Song with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia
Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.
Alleluia. Alleluia.
Isn't that great?
Just wonderful. isn't that great just wonderful and uh talk about uh the ability of a person to persevere
andrea baccelli blinded after i believe was a bicycle or horse riding accident
um incredible soccer prowess and so on shifted over into into vocals and singing, used to actually sing in bars and
things like that.
He's got music.
In fact, one of his guests on his tour was the musician who used to play with him in
bars.
The woman you saw up on the balcony there is his wife.
And we got to see him for his Christmas concert.
And it actually happened over two days. The first day in Boston at the Boston Garden, we were supposed to see Andre Bocelli play, but there was a delay. And about 15 minutes after he was supposed to come on and a woman came out, just regular, you know, regular clothing and things like that. And the orchestra was all set up and all the lights were looking beautiful.
And it was his wife.
And she said, you know, I'm really sorry,
but I'm here to let you know that Andrea has had a chest cold and he,
we worked all afternoon and he thought he might be able to do it up to the
standards he wants to present to you, but we
just can't do it. So we're going to cancel the show and I want to thank you all. And I know you
all, you know, you came from various places and so on. You took time out of your night. We are
going to come back as soon as possible. Literally, I thought it was going to be all next year. Well,
she says, you know, we'll, we'll, you know, your tickets will be usable. They came back in two weeks. It was amazing. It was amazing. And his daughter was there and his son was there. And they're just a great example of people who persevere and put their faith in God. And they understand that God put them there for reasons. and those reasons are constantly revealed. So happy Good Friday to you, everybody.
Sorry.
And big thanks to David Knight for letting me fill in for David on this The David Knight Show.
Now, I want to offer the opportunity now to bring in our next guest.
And that man is Jacob Hornberger. Jacob is the founder and president of the Future
of Freedom Foundation. And you might have seen me mention his excellent piece, among many,
about what I mentioned before, about fake charity through government. And of course, much more when it comes to the ripoff
that is the social security program. And so I want to welcome Jacob. I believe Jacob is going
to be there. Oh, it looks like he's just away from the camera right now. So we'll bring him in
in just a minute, I think. Oh, are you there, Jacob?
Yeah, I'm here.
Oh, great.
I think we don't have you on camera, but I think we'd get, you're just going on audio,
it looks like right now.
So we can go with that.
That's fine with me.
Thank you for joining us, Jacob.
Welcome to the show.
Well, thank you, Gardner.
But I should be there.
I can't understand why I'm not there.
Let me see. Let me check on something here.
You've got a background and your name, of course, which is great, but we do need your handsome face.
And by the way, kudos to you. I recently got to see one of your brief pieces in Spanish.
Hello. Ah, there you go. Looking very, very familiar. I've watched that
face and heard that voice many times on video. Jacob, welcome to the David Knight Show and thanks
for joining us. Yeah, that's great. And thank you for having me, Gardner. It's nice to be here.
Oh, real pleasure. Real pleasure. And you handled the text so well. It's always so interesting.
You know, we haven't met in person and I've admired your work for so many years. And as you know, we have your friends with Richard Ebeling and I'm acquainted with Richard from his
days when he was at FEE and you were, you headed up Foundation for Economic Education for a while
and your education, both of you have brought me so much. And you probably hear this from so many
people, such a rich and deep, fun way of learning from people who are positive about so many people, such a rich and deep, fun way of learning from people who are positive about so
many subjects. And some of these subjects, Jacob, and this is one of them we're going to touch on
this now, some of these subjects are very, very touchy subjects. And as I mentioned to you in
email, one of the things we're going to discuss today, Future Freedom Foundation, first want to
talk about how people can find you. And we'll give them a little preview. We're going to talk about immigration and the border for the bulk of our chat today. And some people might find what you have to say as running counter to what they might have heard or some of the things that they've really gotten intense about when it comes to the battle over the border and United States policy and checking the immigrants and things like that. A lot of nuances here. We're going to talk about that. And I really like your approach
because it's the peaceful, voluntary approach. And it reminds people about some deeper lessons.
Why don't you tell us about Future Freedom Foundation, how they can find you online and
on Twitter and X and YouTube and so on? Okay. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me on.
And let me just make a slight correction.
Richard, my good friend, Richard Eberling,
did serve as president of the Foundation for Economic Education,
FEE as it's known.
I served as program director, not as president.
Just wanted to clarify that.
So I founded the Future of Freedom Foundation after
leaving FEE. I founded it in 1989. And our mission from the very beginning and has been ever since
is to present the principled uncompromising case for the libertarian philosophy.
And what we wanted to do from the very beginning is to take libertarian principles and put them in the context of real life issues.
So that rather than just writing an esoteric article on why the minimum wage should be
repealed, we take a minimum wage controversy occurring in some state and we apply the
libertarian principles to that so that these principles would be more relevant. So that's
what we've done for some 34
years. Richard and I worked together from the very beginning, and we're still working together.
We're very good friends. We're on the same page as the importance of principle when it comes to
advancing libertarianism, and we co-host a weekly show called The Libertarian Angle. It is phenomenal. I've spent so much time.
You know, it's interesting, Jacob, many, many years ago, I was pretty badly injured and I got,
and you're probably familiar with these things. I got copies from laissez-faire books of the
knowledge products, audio tapes narrated by Charlton Heston and Louis Rukeyser on philosophy and economics and so on.
And I would listen to those over and over again. I literally, I had to do a lot of physical
rehabilitation. So I was lying down a lot and then I would start to walk and I would listen to these
on cassette. I got such a great education from those things, from some free market people. And I get the same satisfaction when I get to hear
you and Richard together. And what I really like about Future Freedom Foundation is, again,
you don't separate the consequences of the morality, of the moral choice of freedom and
peace, leaving your neighbor alone. Because it's not just the consequentialist
philosophy of the greatest good for the greatest number, because good is a subjective valuation.
In economics, it's also something we have to assess ourselves with our own souls. And when
it's imposed on us, that is not a good. Politicians can't tell us what is good for us. And so from that moral core, you always draw out the consequences,
the bad consequences of even for the consequentialists, if they want to argue,
well, this will be better. No, you show how it doesn't work and you show how freedom
leads to more prosperity. It leads to better lives for people. So the idea of the golden rule
of treating your neighbor as you would want to be treated or treating your neighbor in a way, knowing that you don't want to be treated a certain way, also reciprocating that you do a great job with that. And so kudos to you. Absolutely. And please pass on my best to Richard. He's Will, and thank you very much. I mean, I've always believed that the moral case for
freedom is the most powerful case. I mean, that's what caused me to just realize that I was a
libertarian, that freedom is right. People should be free to live their lives any way they choose,
so long as their conduct is peaceful. And as Milton Friedman once said, that even if freedom resulted in, let's say, more poverty, he would still favor it because freedom is right.
And that's my position.
But what's nice is that God has created a consistent universe where good things bring good consequences. And so a free society brings prosperity, harmony, peace,
freeing people to pursue happiness in their own way. So we've got the best of all worlds. We've
got the moral case for why people should be free, but we've also got the cases, freedom increases
standards of living for people, and it frees people up to become the best of whatever they wish to be. You know, Jacob, you remind me of, and you probably have read it, that short
story by Ursula Le Guin, who passed away a few years ago, the science fiction writer. And she
was very much against Jeremy Bentham's concept of the greatest good for the greatest number.
She was very critical of, you know, utilitarianism in its early forms without any
sort of moral tie. And again, there's the illogic of describing the greatest good of someone
dictating to you, well, this is the greatest good. And of course, the sacrifice of the individual.
She wrote a short story called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. And it's about a city that's
constructed in concentric circles with a tower
in the middle, just like the panopticon of Bentham. And the city is idyllic. But once a year,
everybody who is young goes into the center of the city where there's a cell.
And in this idyllic city where there's no disease and everyone is happy and all the troubles of all those
people are transmuted to this one child who suffers for everyone. And those people who see it
and walk away are the ones who are moral because you can't just have the benefits, so-called
benefits for everyone. But the key thing there is that you're not going
to get the benefits if you don't allow for freedom, as you say. And I think one of the very
important things to think about here is central authority, central planning, as F.A. Hayek noted,
as many economists noted even before that, but Hayek got a lot of the recognition, and so thus deserved as well.
But central planning and the larger areas of control lead to an information problem where
the central authority isn't able to get the information that we on hand could define for
ourselves and express through prices and allow for resource allocation and discovery. Instead, they make the decisions for people. So let's turn
to an issue that you have done a phenomenal job discussing, the border, so-called uniform border.
You might have seen in my emails, I've mentioned that constitutionally, the word immigration
doesn't even appear in the U.S. Constitution for those people who call themselves constitutional conservatives. But you bring up a lot of stories from your own experiences in your youth near the Rio
and working on a farm and also talking about free association, again, the economic importance of it.
And I'd love to hear your thoughts for people. If you encounter people who are very bound up over the federal government's got to guard the border, the federal government's got to stop illegal immigration.
How do you explain it to people in ways that especially conservatives who might be very worried about the so-called immigration issue?
How do you how do you approach it? What do you think is usually the best way that you find
is a productive way where they won't look at you as being some, you know, excuser for so-called
the Biden administration or, you know, taking on that sort of polarity sort of thing?
Yeah, well, that goes to methodology. And after three decades of advancing libertarianism, I've concluded that Frank Shodoroff, who was a famous libertarian conservative writer in the 1950s and 60s, he got it right.
He said, our job is not to make libertarians, it's to individualists, but, you know, I'm very skeptical of convincing any conservative right winger of the merits of libertarianism, open borders.
I really think that our job is to find the people who are receptive, that are looking for a viable alternative.
Because the problem with a lot of conservatives is their minds are just shut. And so I'll, you know, if they really want to gather, enter into an exchange, a well-meaning exchange, instead of just to argue.
The first principal argument here is the argument of freedom. I mean, it's what I said earlier, that for me, that's everything. Now, that doesn't appeal to a large number of people. A lot of Americans think they're
free. It brings to mind Johann Goethe's famous quote, none are more hopelessly enslaved than
those who falsely believe they are free. But what I mean by freedom is the libertarian concept of
being free to cross borders peacefully, to engage in any peaceful act. That's essentially the overall concept.
To live your life the way you want so long as your conduct doesn't involve the initiation of
force or fraud. Well, when you cross a border, a political border, you're not initiating force
against anyone. You're not violating rights. I do a lot of traveling by car and I cross borders all the time, state borders.
And a lot of other cars that are moving in my direction or in the opposite direction do the same thing.
You don't even know you've crossed a state border.
There's no big red line there that says state border.
The only way you really know it is you see a sign that says welcome to the state of North Carolina.
So there is no violation of rights crossing the border.
That's part of what freedom is about. If somebody interdicts you, stops you, they're the ones that are initiating force.
Now, again, I think a relatively small number of people respond to that freedom argument.
I think most people respond to the utilitarian argument. And that is that
this system simply doesn't work. It was designed to keep people from entering the United States
without permission, without official permission. Well, originally they just put a sign there at
the border. Let's just take my hometown of Laredo, Texas, which is situated there on the
border. They put a sign at the international bridge saying, you cannot enter the United
States without permission. And that's it. Okay. Well, the problem is, is that people have always
wanted to pursue happiness by crossing borders, by going to areas where they can get a better
standard of living, better opportunity, maybe even save their lives. And so, by going to areas where they can get a better standard of living,
better opportunity, maybe even save their lives.
And so they're going to circumvent that sign.
And they're just going to go around it by trespassing onto somebody's private property
by swimming across a rail grand.
So that means the state then has to build this huge police state.
And I experienced that police state.
I lived almost half my life on the border.
You got highway checkpoints and all this, and a lot of death, a lot of suffering. It has never
worked, Gardner, and it still isn't working. But rather than recognize that, people say, oh,
Biden has opened borders, which is ludicrous because you've got a massive border patrol.
You've got a massive Berlin Wall. You've got now concertina wire checkpoints. Yes. Everything. So it hasn't worked. The only thing that works is
freedom and that's open borders. Absolutely. And when I think about this, there are a few facets.
We're speaking with Jacob Hornberger, founder, president of the Future Freedom Foundation. Find them at FFF.org, FFF.org.
I'm telling you folks, sign up for the daily emails, some of the, literally some of the
best satisfaction of your morning and your day reading from these people. And, and Jacob,
this isn't, this isn't to sing your praises so loudly. I could sound like Andrea Bocelli,
but it's just, it's a real pleasure to be able to chat with you. I've been
looking forward to this so long. You know, there are a number of facets, little vectors that come
in here, Jacob, that I'd like to mention when we think about freedom of association, because if
market trades, we can ask people, is a conversation part of your freedom of association?
Yes, absolutely.
Is getting together for a date part of your freedom of association?
Absolutely.
Is sitting next to someone on a park bench?
Yes, absolutely.
How about engaging in a trade, a baseball card trade or something?
Yes, absolutely.
How about a financial trade?
There's no difference there.
It's two consenting individuals engaging in what they
want to do with each other and not harming each other. Should someone aggressively interfere with
that? No. Okay. Then how about we'll apply the same argument to, I would like to buy a baseball
card from someone in England. He made the baseball card. know, we got to pick and choose here. And I think
the American maker of the baseball card, again, the consequentialist utilitarian idea that they
seem to think will benefit the American maker of the baseball card. And we can apply it to human
beings as well. And a lot of times from especially union members, they would really get angry about
the idea of more migrants. Now, some of them would think, well, maybe would really get angry about the idea of more migrants.
Now, some of them would think, well, maybe we could get them onto the unions and things like
that. A lot of political machinations there, but particularly they didn't like the idea of
high immigration because they would say they're stealing American jobs. And so one of the things
that I did very early on is I thought, okay, I want to do a study myself of time periods in American history of very high so-called legal immigration, according to the United States government. argument that native workers lose a lot of jobs to these people who will work for less,
whether that consequentialist argument actually held anyway. And as I went into it, I discovered
that Julian Simon had already done the work and he had already done this macro study of five other
studies of periods of high immigration. So again, they're skipping the moral part of it. But when we look at saying to people, no, they don't, we can work through the economics. And I often bring up the simple machines. I say, look, when I talk to my students, I say, I introduced them to the simple machines. I saying, I want to invent the inclined plane, you know, or I want to invent the lever.
But they knew by using a tool that could increase the amount of distance they could have, they could have smaller amounts of force per distance.
And one person could now do the work that it used to take two.
So now one person is free.
You're not going to complain that that person now no longer has to toil to do what one guy can now do with a simple invention.
You're not going to say that man is now unemployed.
How awful.
Let's get rid of that invention.
No.
If people like the invention, just like language or the growth, the spontaneous growth of money as a way to communicate value to each other and give people something that is exchangeable.
If it works for people, they'll
keep it spontaneously. And this is what freedom of association is, why it's so important. Because
when you have these artificial impediments, they always get gamed. And of course, in the end,
we see that the person who could be saving some toil with being able to hire someone for maybe
a little bit less, Now you're never going
to know what happened with that money that could have been saved. Just like Frederick Bastia said
in the parable of the broken window, the opportunity is now lost. We're never going to
know the other person who could have been employed by the money that was saved. We never are going to
know what that other person could have done if he didn't have to help that one guy lift something up.
And this I think translates to periods of high immigration because he didn't have to help that one guy lift something up. And this, I think,
translates to periods of high immigration because people didn't lose their jobs. New businesses
started because consumers could save money. And it's just like choosing a product from overseas
or working with someone. If you can reduce your costs, you are reducing costs for the consumer.
Why do we want to increase costs for the consumer?
The whole point is to try to get more for less, right? Yeah, your points are eloquent and insightful.
And let me address the first one on freedom of association, because it's one that often comes
up in the immigration debate. I often get emails from people saying, you know, we should be able to keep the door locked or decide who comes in the door, just like our homes.
Would you let anybody into your home, Jacob?
Well, we're not a national home.
You know, it's logical that Cuba would think in terms of a national home because in Cuba, the state owns everything.
But here in the United States, we're a nation built
on the concept of private property. So a person has the right to exclude people from his private
home. In fact, that's the kind of system we live in. You have freedom of association with respect
to who comes into your house. You can discriminate against Jews, Catholics, Blacks, Italians,
whoever you want to discriminate
against. And the state can't do anything about it because it's your private property.
But by the same token, I have the same right. And no one has a right to interfere with me if I want
to bring into my home an Italian, a Mexican, a Guatemalan, or whatever. It's my right to
associate with whom I want. And I would extend
that to businesses. Businesses are private owners. And so if businesses want to sell to
foreigners or hire foreigners, that's their right. It's their business and their money.
So it's totally different from this national concept of a national home that has one door to
it. The other thing is very important that you point out that the division of
labor that comes from immigration, it does increase standards of living. And look at the,
it wasn't an open border situation totally, the Ellis Island kind of system. Government was
controlling, filtering people, but they let in around 95 or 96% of the immigrants. And this was one of the major factors
that led to the tremendous increase in prosperity, especially by the time the 1800s starts ending up.
And the people at the bottom of the economic ladder here in the United States, let's say
farm workers that have high school degrees or working on a farm, are they displaced by an uneducated immigrant from Mexico?
Absolutely.
And that appears to the farm worker, the American farm worker, to be catastrophic.
Actually, it turns out that he's much better off because, as you point out,
the immigrants are now buying things at Walmart.
They're buying used cars.
They're buying used clothing. And the market there, all of a sudden, a sign shows up at Walmart. They're buying used cars. They're buying used clothing. And the
market there, all of a sudden, a sign shows up at Walmart saying, we've got this tremendous demand
workers needed here. So the Americans that had been working on the farm are now being employed
at Walmart because they have educations. They're able to deal with customers better than the
migrant can. And they have an increase in wages. So that's what's happened historically, that when you have this open immigration, open border system, everybody's prospering, including the terminology that many people found to really rub them the wrong way during the lockdowns of the picking winners and losers.
Your job is essential.
Your job is not essential.
To try to translate that into things about tariffs. You know, I had
James Bovard on recently when I was filling in for David and, you know, his book, The Fair Trade
Fraud is just so phenomenal. It's great. And so we know that a lot of people find it very distasteful
to hear these top down authoritarians telling us, well, your job is essential.
What they're saying is I'm going to use force to decide whether you can work, right, whether you can go and get together with people and actually offer try to tell people. I say, if you oppose the central authority, the central
planners from not only engaging in the immoral act of blocking you from just engaging in peaceful
conversations or work with other people, then how do you feel about the immoral imposition
of them choosing what is an essential or non-essential job? And then, of course,
we have the economic ramifications of that,
of that central planning. It never works. They are always screwing things up. And I say, well,
let's translate it to tariffs because what they're doing there is saying, we know what is
essential and not essential. We are going to favor a particular field or particular workers,
whether they're washing machine manufacturers in Ohio
and Senator Portman loves them. And he gets Donald Trump to impose this ridiculous tariff on
imports or something else, steel or something like that. And so that oftentimes people say,
yeah, you know, that did bother me. Sometimes you can't convince them. But I think the same
sort of thing with this sort of authoritarian usurpation, this conceit, this hubris that politicians seem to have.
And I think many people in a way use the politicians almost as avatars.
They buy into this and they say, oh, yes, definitely.
We're doing the right thing.
We're stopping these other people for our neighbor.
Well, you're picking and choosing essential and non-essential.
You're telling the consumer your choices are not essential. I'm saying to you, I am precluding you
from even thinking about dealing with this person. So, of course, the ramifications of that are very
clear. As you say, you have a police state. You have checkpoints 50 miles away from the Mexican border in Arizona, people trying to go to
work. And again, seeing the same people every day rolling down the window, like, hi, I'm trying to
get to work again today. And yeah. And, you know, complete, complete abrogations of the fourth
amendment of the constitution and so on. And I think it's interesting because your experience on a farm is something that really
helps, I think, give examples. And I worked on a farm stand myself and worked with Jamaican
migrants who would come up every summer here in New Hampshire to pick apples. Can you tell us a
little bit about some of the changes that you saw as a kid working on the farm near the Mexican
border in Texas? And of course, people can actually watch you speaking Spanish
to spread the word of freedom in Espanol.
If they're on Facebook, they might have seen your most,
one of your most recent posts over there.
Tell us a little bit, if you could, about your personal experience
and how that sort of works into what you did professionally as a lawyer.
And again, bringing it back to today
with the central planning and the borders. Yeah. Let me first amplify on the two points
you made though, because they're such good points on the central planning aspect.
You're absolutely right about the protective tariffs. And it's what you said earlier about
Basiat's concept of what is seen and unseen. A tariff is just a sales tax on a foreign good. And when they
impose it high enough, people say, okay, I'll buy domestically. But what's unseen in this is all the
money they would have saved by buying the cheaper product. They would have used that money for other
purposes, buy a vacation, buy shoes. And so we never see those businesses that are hurt by virtue of the tariff.
And you're right. It's what Hayek called a fatal conceit that government officials have in terms
of deciding who should be protected and who shouldn't be protected. And I also want to point
out that that's what immigration controls are. It's a socialist system based on the principle
of central planning. You have government officials planning the movements of millions upon millions of people in a very complex labor market,
deciding what the total number is going to be, what the credentials are going to be,
how much allocated to each country. This is what Hayek called the fatal conceit of the planner.
It cannot be done without what Ludwig von Mises called planned chaos, which is what we've had
on the border. And then they bring in called planned chaos, which is what we've had on the
border. And then they bring in this police state, which now leads me into answering your question
directly. I grew up on a farm on the Rio Grande. We hired illegal immigrants. When I was in high
school, I was out, you know, we were playing, we would work with the workers out there. It wasn't
illegal to hire illegal immigrants at the time.
And they were my buddies, my brothers and me.
And we would play football out there.
We'd sometimes sit out on the porch and eat dinner with them.
They were our buddies. They lived there on the farm with us.
And one day the Border Patrol came in without a warrant.
They could enter onto our farm without any judicial order whatsoever, whenever they
wanted. If we put a lock on the gate, they would just shoot off the lock if we hadn't given them a
key. And so they came in and usually our workers were quick enough to hide, like in a barn we had
there. And fortunately, the border patrol never came into our home. We lived out there on the farm, but they would come into our farm. And one day they came and busted our workers. And
it was a very traumatic experience for me. I mean, my brothers and I had tears in our eyes
as they were carting away our workers. And that was, I think, my real first experience with the
immigration police state. I mean, it shows you how far back this goes. This is like in
the 1960s, this immigration crisis. It's nothing new. It's been going on for some 80 years.
Another time I was headed to the beach in Port Aransas near Corpus Christi. I was meeting friends
and all of a sudden the red light turns on. It's a border patrol agent. And he pulls me over.
No, no excuse at all.
No broken taillight.
I had done nothing wrong.
No speeding anything.
He just says, get out of your car and open your trunk.
This is what's called a roving border patrol checkpoint.
Oh, of course.
And so I objected.
I said, you don't have the authority to do this.
And he says, well, you can follow me
back to headquarters and we'll resolve it there. Or you can open up your trunk. Well, I was late.
I wish I had said, screw you, I'll follow you back. But I didn't. I opened up the trunk. And
then when you head north out of Laredo, about 40 miles, you come over the crest of a hill
and you think you're
in Mexico. There's this huge immigration checkpoint there where they're stopping cars.
You can be subject to a complete search there like you're at the bridge where they can,
you know, at the bridge, they can tell you to drop your trousers, drop your underwear, bend over so
they can check your body cavities.
Same with women.
You forfeit your rights with this system of immigration control.
It's not just a control on foreigners.
You go into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico for one hour just to shop at the market.
You come back.
You have forfeited your rights.
You got a cell phone.
You have to disclose your password so they can search your
cell phone if they choose to do this. This is the police state that exists along the border.
Now they've got this concertina wire that's designed to cut people up. They've had this
Berlin Wall. And then they finally criminalized the hiring of illegal immigrants along with the
transportation of them, caring for them. If you're
driving along a highway and you see an immigrant collapsed on the side of the road from dehydration,
you give him water, you carry him to an emergency room, you're going to get indicted for a felony
offense of harboring or caring for illegal immigrants. So it's just a horrific system.
It violates religious principles. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as th horrific system it it violates religious principles thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself it violates economic principles free markets it violates moral principles of
freedom it you know i it just it's very befuddling to me garter why americans continue to hew to this
system and i've i finally decided it's because we've all been born and raised under this socialist
system right and you're accustomed to it when you become accustomed to something freedom becomes I finally decided it's because we've all been born and raised under this socialist system.
And you're accustomed to it.
When you become accustomed to something, freedom becomes a very frightening prospect.
It's like, oh my gosh, that's unpredictable, Jacob.
The whole world might come here and all these catastrophic thoughts start entering people's minds.
Boy, those are such great insights.
Our guest on The David Knight Show, I'm Gardner Goldsmith, filling in for David today on Good Friday. Thank you for joining us. Our guest is Jacob Hornberger. The Future of Freedom Foundation can be found at fff.org and also on Twitter slash X. Is it futureoffreedom on Twitter slash X, Jacob?
I believe so.
Yes, yes. We'll double check and I'll make sure that I get that out there.
I've never liked Twitter, so my colleague Bart handles it all.
Well, what I like is anytime I share one of your articles, it will do the at future freedom.
It will recognize what you, you know, when I put it out on X, it'll do the at so that you know that I shared something because I really, I really appreciate so many of the pieces that you write. And, you know,
you're always featuring great pieces by so many of the people who have been heroes to me and sort of,
you know, over time, as I started to lecture on economics, and I used to drive five hours just
to get to Irvington from New Hampshire when Richard was president of FEE. And I would go
down there and, you know, see Robert Higgs or Tom DiLorenzo speak or whatever. And it was just,
it was phenomenal. It was just the best time. And I have to tell you, Jacob, one time after Richard
left Hillsdale, my father had passed away. My dad was a proto-arian, uh, born in 1917. He had a copy of human action
that he annotated for the kids, you know, Adam Smith had notes. Yeah. And so when I was a
teenager, he was giving me Hazlitt and Milton Friedman. And I had a question. I was like, dad,
I think Milton Friedman's got a little something wrong here. And he goes, ah, yes. Well, he's not
exactly, he's good, but there's some mistakes. So, you know, he was right on it.
And so I used to drive down to their Friday afternoon lectures, you know, and then walk
over to the library in Irvington and see the statue of Rip Van Winkle under the tree and so on. It was
wonderful. And it's fascinating because when I get to see these pieces by people that I admire,
you've worked for a great amount of time. So many people have been influenced by this. And I had the opportunity a while back to
write a piece, at least to tell people, my go-to as a voluntarist, my position is peace and the
golden rule, as you say. But I at least will try to appeal to people on the
central planning concept. I try to tell people to say, look, in the Constitution, as you can see,
as you said, you start to deal with these laws and they pile up like layers of tarnish on silver,
one after the other, a new regulation, and it never works. Now we've got many people
complaining that the government, literally the central planners, that they always said,
you've got to be the answer. You've got to take care of the border. Now, well, it's not doing
what they wanted. Now they're literally spending tax money to give $10,000 debit cards to migrants
in New York. They're paying for people to be housed in hotels outside
of Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, where the Patriots play football. So now we're seeing so
many people so riled up about the border under the central authority, but it's not under the
authority they want to run the system. And they're not learning the lesson of central planning,
which is it just depends on who the central planner is. So you're not learning the lesson of central planning, which is it just depends on
who the central planner is. So you're not going to get what you want. You just have to. And so
what I do is one of the ways that I try to start things off is you talked about seeing the legal
side of things in so many cases. And you got involved as a lawyer when you went back to Texas
to try to help for the civil liberties of these people.
I try to bring up to people, look, you're under a false artifice. You're under an artifice
when you look at so-called federal government immigration policy, because the word immigration
doesn't appear in the U.S. Constitution. If at least as a voluntarist, I'd say I'd rather have
voluntary systems like the Brehon Law System or Viking Age Iceland or something like that, or even the Articles of Confederation, I would probably prefer.
But according to the politicians who swear their oaths, there's no word immigration of the Constitution that was about slavery, the importation or migration
of certain persons in the states now existing, as they said in the Constitution, shall not be
influenced by the Congress until after 1808, which was a way to try to entice and cajole the
southern states to sign on to the Constitution. And then they had the Missouri Compromise. They
would never have had the Missouri Compromise if the federal government could control the migration or importation of slaves into any of the functionality went under the Constitution then, it wasn't a federal purview.
And during the Sedition Act, the Alien and Sedition Act period, the Alien Act, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in 1798, they both wrote.
One was the Kentucky Resolve, Virginia Resolve for Madison.
It's a state purview. And it wasn't until 1875 with the Supreme Court ruling in this case called Chi Lung v. Freeman, when basically the Supreme Court made it up out of whole cloth.
It was a California statute, and it was up to the California government, as bad as I think it is, they were blocking importation of Chinese people to come into California.
Because they claimed that the
women were going to be prostitutes carrying diseases. Really, it was a block against Chinese
laborers on the railroads and in the gold mines. They didn't want the native workers to have the
competition. And so from there, it went to the federal government. And there we get all of these
things that you had to deal with as a kid, as they grew and grew and grew from Ellis Island being the port. You've got to show your documents. Now, as you say, you've got to show your your phone. I mean, it's like Checkpoint Charlie. It's it's craziness. But again, it goes towards. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the media plays on this. It all goes towards looking to the central authority and to break out of that mindset,
at least by showing people, look, if you think that the constitution is at least going to be
the functional system, look at what it says and recognize that they didn't want that sort of
central authority making those plans, at least go with some sort of confederation concept,
but they won't buy into it. It's very difficult to convince people of that.
Yeah, you've raised a lot of good points. First of all, I've got to say I'm very envious that
you learned about these ideas when you were in high school. Richard did too. I was in my late
20s when I discovered libertarianism. So when I went back to practice law in Laredo,
I just hated the system, the whole immigration system, even though
I didn't realize that I was a libertarian. I didn't know anything about libertarianism.
So I went to the local federal judge who I'd known as a kid because my dad was a lawyer.
And I said, Judge, I'd like you to appoint me to represent illegal immigrants for free. I'll do it
for free because I think it's a very arbitrary, capricious system, the way they're enforcing it. And it was. And I want to I'm going to challenge the constitutionality of it.
Now I'm going to take it to the Fifth Circuit on an appeal. And the judge says, fine. So he started
appointing me. And and that was actually laying the seeds for my discovery of libertarianism,
because one day I was out at the detention center waiting for one of my
clients to come over to me to talk. And I was watching all these guys walk around, probably
about 200 guys in this detention center. And it had like a concentration camp environment to it,
you know, guard towers and barbed wire on the walls and stuff. And as I'm watching all these guys, Gardner, it hits me. If the
leftists, which I was, I thought government should be helping the poor and so forth,
love the poor, needy, and disadvantaged so much, why are they doing this to these people? All they
want to do is work. And so I went and asked a couple of my leftist friends, how do you reconcile
this? And I was really troubled by it.
This was before discovering libertarianism. And they said, oh, well, the law is the law.
Well, that wasn't good enough for me. Because as you point out, the Constitution brings into
existence a government of limited enumerated powers. There is no enumerated power to control
immigration. And not surprisingly, because in the
Declaration of Independence, one of the reasons for the break with King George was he was controlling
immigration into the colonies. And that's cited as one of the reasons. That's right. I forgot about
that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And then in the Constitution, they allow for naturalizations as a way to become
a citizen.
But that's a totally different concept from people just crossing the border, retaining their citizenship, working, touring, visiting and so forth.
And so that framework was a beautiful framework. Now, as you point out and as I pointed out, the Ellis Island system was not an open border system.
Everybody had to go
through a government checkpoint. And government was vested with the power to decide who comes in.
Now, they were flexible. They let in more immigrants. But then that leads, as you point
out, to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, because government says, okay, well, we're vested with this
power. You have vested with us. So now we we're vested with this power. You invested with us.
So now we're going to use this power to exclude Chinese because it was a racist law. It was
designed with the idea that Chinese will never be real Americans because they don't look like
real Americans. And isn't it interesting because, Jacob, what's fascinating is the California
statute that was exclusionary against Chinese coming into the state of California that was challenged,
that led to the 1875 Chi-Lung v. Freeman decision, which was a completely errant and destructive decision, that led to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act on a national level. So the very people who were challenging that on a state level
ended up ceding the power to the federal government, which did exactly the same thing
that the Chinese Exclusion Act did in California seven years earlier. It's crazy. And again,
it's central authority. I don't want to come down too hard on those people who I think rightly
recognize the immorality and the injustice of central planners
now actually paying for other people to move. I understand that argument. I understand
the distaste that people have for that and the complexities of the confusion that it creates
in all these localities. But by the same token, I think not getting to the root of this really is
a disservice to people intellectually and also on a moral level to not look at this deeper lesson.
And I'll translate it to something here. I was helping a young woman from Siberia actually
move to the United States a number of years ago. She wanted to go to law school here.
And we had met at a free state project thing. She was dating a friend of ours and she and I stayed in touch and she toured around for a little
while as I brought her to various schools and so on and a really nice woman. And, um, and so we
were, we found this Mexican restaurant in a town called Bedford. It was amazing. Casablanca, just
incredible. And I started to talk to the waiter and he didn't really speak English
all that well. And I said, gee, I'm really glad you're here. And we got on the subject of
immigration and he actually let us know he was not here legally, according to the statutes.
Now the prices at this place and the service at this place, we must have saved 10 or $15
every time we ate there. We ate there over and over.
It was so good. It was incredible. And she was just delighted. She was, this is incredible.
This is wonderful. She was a libertarian as well. And so they got busted. And it made me think to
myself, if a bunch of mafia thugs had entered that building every day and smashed a window to take it in, in, in Bastia's parlance, right.
In a way.
Um, and said, ah, you know, you bought that window from, uh, from so-and-so.
I didn't like that.
You should buy from Vito, my friend.
And Vito stuff costs $10 more per window.
That's money that, that, that restaurant is going to be losing. Eventually,
the restaurant, when we were there, the restaurant, they got busted, they got shut down.
That was a place where we were saving the $10. I could use that to buy gasoline or go to a
convenience store or buy a painting by someone if I had added up enough money. So as you say,
these opportunity costs,
when we don't stick with the morality of things, when we don't leave people alone,
when we engage in force, when one engages in force, these have secondary and tertiary
consequences that people don't see. And so I do appreciate so much your personal story and then what can't be defined as state action.
And this is where I'll make sort of my final point that I've made a few times on David's
show and my Liberty Conspiracy show, which is that even when one goes to define charity,
you need to have volition.
The politicians aren't the ones who are spending the money on Alzheimer's research or on cancer
research,
yet they claim America cares. They're not the ones who are providing the help themselves out of their own wallet for an elderly person. And social security, as you pointed out,
they claim it's insurance. It's not. It's a Ponzi scheme. It's a welfare scheme.
But I try to say, even if logically someone tries to define a political border or barrier as a political
border or barrier, technically speaking, that's not possible because there's nothing that the
state does that anyone can actually say is good because the actual quality of goodness hasn't
been allowed to be translated through anybody's volition. So the same thing applies to a political
border. You can't have,
there was no volition in the decision as to where that political border is, where it's going to be
placed over somebody's private property, typically, or how it's going to be managed. Then you get to
the tragedy of the commons where everybody's arguing over how's that going to be managed.
Well, the only way you can really manage it is if you leave people alone to have private property.
Then you can show where people wanted their borders to be. Because one person might say, well, yeah, I was a taxpayer, but I don't like the way they're managing that. And another person might say, I like the way they're managing that. It's impossible. It's not manageable. And this, of course, goes towards the voluntarist argument against the state itself in the abstract. But any final
thoughts on that? And then to wrap things up, of course, I know you've got to go at 11,
but there are some other things that I'd love to people, whet people's appetite about the JFK
assassination, because you're a real, real student of this, a real expert on this. But
any final thoughts on the border thing to, you know, again, I don't want to attack people too
hard who are recognizing some problems with this collectivist system.
But I think it's important to to actually express this.
This is a problem of collectivism.
It is. But I think your human interest story about that restaurant is so friggin fascinating.
And as you were relating it, I was thinking about the lockdowns that Among libertarians, there's a moral indignation and outrage, and
rightly so, over the lockdowns of so many businesses that destroyed the businesses.
And yet, why is it they cannot translate that over to what happened to there in your town?
So what if they're Mexican citizens? They're providing a service. Why should they get
locked down and sent away? They're just
human beings. Who cares what citizenship they are? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's a
fascinating point. And I really think that we as Americans have the duty to lead the world to
freedom. I mean, the whole world is mired in central planning,
mired in socialism, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, school vouchers, all these
things that have come to be defined as freedom and libertarian. They have no more to do with
care and compassion than any other socialist program. And I often hear that with Social
Security. Oh, Jacob,
how can you be so heartless? We need to continue this for indefinitely because people will be
dying in the streets. Pure nonsense. There is no care or compassion with the IRS and the initiation
of force through taxation. Genuine charity comes from the willing heart of the individual. And
that's where we need to lead the world to the restoration of faith and freedom and free markets.
We live without Social Security and Medicare and immigration controls for more than 100 years.
And everybody was fine, in fact, more than fine.
And there was the greatest outburst of economic, voluntary charity that mankind has ever seen.
And let me make one final point here. We should never forget
that after the Mexican war, the United States stole and absorbed the entire northern half of
Mexico. Now you talk about an alteration of culture. I mean, how could you have a bigger
alteration of culture than to steal and absorb the entire northern half of a foreign country
that had been part of the Spanish empire,
including the 100,000 citizens who were automatically made American citizens.
Is it really unusual that people would want to say they would want to cross the border into what
had been their land for centuries? I don't think so. And I think that's another important point
that we should keep in mind when we see migrants
simply crossing the border to what had been their country. You know, Jacob, you remind me a little
bit. I don't know if you got to see the first season of the AMC TV series, and I very rarely
watch TV anymore, but Pierce Brosnan starred in a show called The Sun based on a novel. And it's about the early 1900s down near the Rio Grande in areas
that formerly had been run and owned by Mexican people. And then the United States government,
then you have the Texas problem. Then you've got the Native Americans, and they're all arguing over who should have this land, what tribe had this land, and so on.
And Pierce Brosnan now is discovering that there's oil interest in some of these areas.
And it is a fascinating look.
It's a real great snapshot, very honest as well, I think, from at least the history that I know of the area, about all the disparate interests and arguing that went on about, well, our family was here
first and our family was here first. Well, this happened to us. It's fascinating. And it's really
quite something to see. And, you know, just from a sentimental standpoint, you know, I hate to say
for my own interest purposes,
because these are real lives that are at hand and at stake and, you know, people's rights that are
being abrogated. But to look into the history itself is very enriching, I think. And you do
a great job, even in your personal story, showing snapshots or maybe film, because it's so much more
rich, it's so much richer, to be able to show people what that's like.
Actually, this isn't an intentional transition, but I was checking out your recent,
and for the second time, part of your series on the JFK assassination, in particular the Zabruder film,
and the edits that seem to have been made from the original Zapruder film.
And you have done great work on that. And I'd love to whet people's appetites before you go
about how they can find some of your work on the JFK assassination, because you've done multiple
episodes on things. You've written extensively a book about this. Could you tell us a little bit
about your take on where people might want
to find some of your work on the JFK assassination and the coverups and so on? Yeah, well, the very
best book to start out with for somebody that is interested in understanding why this is not
a conspiracy theory, but is in fact is a fact and in in fact it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, in my opinion,
is the very best book is JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglas. And I'd recommend everybody
start with that book. It's the best overall, deep, profound, easily read synopsis of this
national security state regime change operation. Then go to my book, The Kennedy
Autopsy, which is FFF's all-time bestseller. And then it's really a synopsis of a five-volume book
by a man named Doug Horn called Inside the Assassination Records Review Board. And Horn,
it served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s.
And Horn's book put the matter over the line for me beyond a reasonable doubt.
Prior to that time, I had been convinced that it was a regime change operation based on all the evidence, but I couldn't prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, which, as you know, is the standard of proof in a criminal case. Horn's book put me over the line on beyond a reasonable doubt.
And I think like a lawyer, you know, I don't think in terms of conspiracy theories. I was a trial
attorney for 12 years. Well, Horn's book concentrates on the autopsy that was conducted
on President Kennedy's body and documents in excruciating detail the fraudulent
nature of that autopsy. Well, once you establish beyond a reasonable doubt that there was a
fraudulent autopsy conducted by the military, it's case closed. That's it now because there's
no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy. It's over. No one has ever come up with an innocent explanation for a fraudulent
autopsy. And like I say, Horn documents it. We could go into examples, but that sealed it for me.
So I would recommend the Kennedy autopsy. Now, my newest book is called An Encounter with Evil, the Abraham Zabruder story. One of the things about the
fraudulent autopsy, Gardner, was that the military came up with a photograph that showed the back of
Kennedy's head to be intact. Well, all the Dallas doctors and the nurses and Secret Service agent
Clint Hill and a multitude of witnesses said Kennedy
had a massive hole in the back of his head. These were the treating physicians. So something's wrong
there. You've got a fraudulent film or fraudulent photograph that's falsely depicting this head to
be intact. Well, the Zabruder film also shows the back of Kennedy's head to be intact. So I decided to delve into that. And I wasn't the first one, I mean, but I wrote this book showing that what happened on the weekend of the assassination, contrary to what had been the official story, was that the original Zabruder film is diverted to a CIA photographic center, first in Washington, and then over to Rochester, New York, where they
produced an altered copy of the film. And I document that in the book in detail, because
in Rochester, they could essentially do anything Hollywood could do. And that's where they produced
an altered copy in order to show that the back of the head was intact to match their fraudulent photographs. So that's the essence of my books.
And really, they revolve around, Horn was the real pioneer in this.
We also have conferences that we've held featuring Horn and other people.
We featured Oliver Stone that are on our website, showing the fraudulent nature of the autopsy, the Cold War context,
why they did this. Another book I'd highly recommend is JFK's War with the National
Security Establishment, Why Kennedy Was Assassinated. This goes to Motive. We published
that book, The Future of Freedom Foundation. It was written by Horn. So if you take these books,
and Horn's the most difficult read of them all.
It's a five volume work, but I will guarantee you, you get through Horn's books and you will have no doubts at all.
I don't have any doubts after reading his. And in fact, we also published a multi-part video by Horn.
That is our most downloaded video in our history detailing the fraudulent nature of this autopsy.
It's rich work, I think, and really must have consumed a lot of time.
But once you start to see that the narrative that you were sold is a fake narrative, then you say, why is it fake?
And then you start to unpeel the onion. And it's
a pretty rancid onion, that's for sure. Well, let me say that the real point of this is not
to see criminal justice, because everybody who's involved in this is dead now. It's to challenge
what I consider the greatest mistake in U.S. history. And that was the conversion of the
federal government to a national security state, consisting of the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, the vast military
industrial complex. This, I mean, is a horrific governmental system that we live under now,
a national security state. You got totalitarian powers, power of assassination, torture,
indefinite detention, including of Americans. And so that's the real
point of this, is that I'm trying to raise people's vision as to the importance of restoring
our original governmental system established by the Constitution, and which lasted for 150 years
or so, and that was a limited government republic, which is the total opposite of a national security
state. If I may, I'd like to also mention something that
I should have mentioned in our immigration discussion, is that we're not the only ones
making this case. There's three other great books that I'd recommend to people. One is brand new,
came out about a month ago, called The Case for Open Borders by John Washington. I think it's
one of the best books I've ever read on immigration. It addresses every single objection to open borders that people raise. There's our book that we published 30 years ago called A Case for Free Trade and Open Immigration. A third book is Open Borders by Brian Kaplan, who's a brilliant economics professor at George Mason University, which I consider the best economics department in the country. And then from a free market Austrian perspective. And then the fourth book I'd
recommend is a book called Let Them In, The Case for Open Borders by Jason Riley, who serves on
the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. You read these four books and I will guarantee
you that you will be an open borders advocate because it's not just some esoteric pie in the sky theory.
There's people actually making the intellectual, moral, religious case and economic case for this concept.
Well, that's so well stated.
And I'm so glad you brought that up.
In fact, Brian Kaplan was here two weeks ago speaking in New Hampshire at a Free State Project event.
And so a lot of people were really excited
to see him. And it just, it's amazing the nexus of people that you find. You say to yourself,
oh, I like this person's work here. And then you find out that they did excellent work over here.
And you say, oh, I'm enriched even more. This is great. So same thing with Brian Kaplan's work and
your work and Richard's work. And I highly recommend if people get the opportunity,
I bought an encounter with evil most recently from the store over there.
And there's so many great items at FFF.org in the store.
You can get all sorts of excellent stuff,
everything on monetary so-called policy,
which that term itself indicates a problem.
And over into immigration and history, Austrian economics,
history mixed in with the Austrian economics theory and the practicality of leaving one's neighbor alone.
Jacob, thank you. Thank you so much for being here.
It's been an absolute pleasure, and I hope I get to talk to you again.
This is great. It's phenomenal.
I just can't tell you, this has been an hour of pure joy for me.
I mean, it's just,
it's been a real, real pleasure
to interact with you on these.
And thank you for letting me share my perspective
with you and your viewers.
It's really been nice.
Well, thank you for your work.
And I'll be in touch with you via email
a little bit later today.
I have to go to a couple appointments
this afternoon and so on, but I'll write to you tonight, send you links and things later today. I have to go to a couple appointments this afternoon and so on,
but I'll write to you tonight, send you links and things like that.
And of course, as long as the NSA doesn't arrest me, I'll, I'll email you.
Okay.
Maybe we'll end up in Guantanamo and share the same cell together.
You can teach me Espanol.
Thank you so much, Gardner. It's been a real pleasure.
You got it. you Jacob real pleasure
absolutely so great to talk to Jacob Hornberger what a nice nice man and of course fff.org
everyone check out fff.org and Jacob Hornberger's work is absolutely great I hope that you will find
him there and check out all the work that Richard Ebeling does as well and check out all the great books.
Well, coming up in just a minute, we're going to be speaking with our next guest, another great proponent of freedom.
He is, of course, Eric Peters of ericpetersautos.com.
And we're going to check out Eric and see what he has to offer
coming up on the David Knight Show
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Well, all right, all right, all right.
Let's get right to it, everybody.
Let's bring in our guest.
He is none other than Eric Peters of Eric Peters Autos.
And Eric, welcome to the show.
And I know you've been listening to the conversation with Jacob Hornberger,
and you've got a lot to offer at ericpetersautos.com.
People can follow you on X as at LibertarianCarG.
And welcome to the show, my friend.
How are you?
I'm good, Garg.
You heretical wrong thinker.
You talking about leaving other people alone?
Bad, bad man.
Bad, bad.. Bad, bad.
You're a bad cornfield time for me, huh?
It's incredible, isn't it?
Yeah, Billy Mummy's going to turn me
into a jack-in-the-box, right?
Do you remember there's a great meme?
I have it somewhere on my desktop
and it shows a guy, you know,
and he's kind of got his hands above the globe
and it says,
Libertarians plotting to take over the world
and leave you alone.
How evil, right?
And it really goes towards the concept, good ideas don't require force, right?
Exactly.
And you've been writing about this.
I was reporting on Liberty Conspiracy on the evening program about, again,
the collapse of the EV markets and so on.
And still the pop media people still try to use these rose-colored terms like,
well, they're taking strategic withdrawals from the market, doing this and doing that.
Like, no, the market is collapsing and the central planners are forcing people.
They're pushing their ideas on people.
Then we have Al Gore recently appearing on CNN with,
of course, Jake Tapper
talking about, we've got an opportunity.
We can stop.
We can go to net zero. We'll stop
the climate change.
My marriage
will no longer be burning to the ground.
I mean, it's utterly
ridiculous. Why don't you tell us about some of your
observations on any of the big news stories that are out there right now?
How about we start with the royal we?
Isn't it great how you and I always get subsumed and encompassed by we?
You know, we're aggregated into this great collective somehow.
Yeah.
That a few individuals presume to represent and speak for us.
And as far as the strategic withdrawal, that sounds like
Hitler in 1944. We are winning the war. You must believe in the end. The final victory is coming.
So the market, it's like you have to systematically destruct every sentence that these
people speak. There is no market. That's the whole point. This whole EV thing is the result
of suppressing the market, of perverting the market, of imposing all of these artificial
contrived incentives via things like the mandates that require zero emissions vehicles, the subsidies,
the tax bribes that are given to people to induce them to buy these vehicles.
If you took all of these things away, there would be no EVs.
Perhaps there'd be a handful of them, maybe as a boutique product somewhere.
But all of this is 100% artificial government-induced craziness.
It's the bottom line.
And they keep trying to push it harder and harder.
And isn't that the stereotypical definition of insanity?
Except it's also tyranny here too yeah yeah you know in a way it's almost like a witch doctor
convincing people in a particular tribe that they must get or have in their hands some totem
that will protect them from evil you know that sort of thing like remember the gilligan's island
episode where gilligan's head looked like the top of the totem pole from some native witch doctor tribe or something. And it was, you know, he tried to replace it with a coconut or something. And then the coconut came down and his head went in there. You know, they thought he was a god or something like that. choose through the machinations of the politically connected government favored fascist, cronyist, mercantilist state where they're going to work with certain corporations or they're going to work with certain NGOs or their philosophy is to constrict our freedoms and have more power over themselves.
And it's all a totem. It's like, you must have this thing to shake off the evil of the climate
change boogeyman. You must buy this thing. I don't want it. It doesn't help me.
Yeah. And it's all really cynical and really disingenuous. Just to make the case for this,
they very oily and slyly changed the definition of emission,
which in a regulatory context used to mean things that caused pollution, specifically air pollution.
Those things have been eliminated essentially from new vehicles. And so that created a problem
because, hey, we don't have a purpose anymore. Why do we have these regulations since the cars are now clean? So what they did was to include carbon dioxide, which is a gas that has nothing to do with air
pollution. You can talk about, put aside the climate change thing for just a minute, and let's
focus on the fact that CO2 bears absolutely nil, zero, no role whatsoever in air pollution, smog,
and things like that. So why would they characterize that as an
emission? It's dishonest. You know, technically, of course, it's emitted. But what they're trying
to do psychologically is manipulate people into believing that carbon dioxide is essentially the
same thing as unburned hydrocarbons, as particulates, as the things that cause smog,
respiratory problems and so on, because who wants that? Right. Most people get it. They Most people get it. Especially people who are old enough to remember what the cities used to look
like 50 years ago. They looked outside and, yeah, the sky's pretty dirty and smoggy. That's not good.
We don't want that. But now they look outside and the sky's blue and things are looking pretty good.
And so they had to create this new boogeyman. David calls it a MacGuffin. I like that term too. It's just a contrived thing to gaslight people, to guilt trip them, to make them think that,
well, if you question this and somehow you're a terrible person, because clearly what you
want is babies to choke and old people to die in the streets.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
You're the demon.
You're going to be gaslighted.
You're the one who wants to be left alone.
But in the leaving alone thing, or you're the one who wants to leave other people alone, but in doing that, in not buying into
their canard that other people have to be managed and pushed around and, and made to do certain
things, you're the one who's actually engaging in an aggressive act. It's absolutely crazy.
I was, when you mentioned the Guffin shirt, you probably saw me look up here. I got my McGuffin shirt. I have two McGuffin shirts and yeah, as, as well as your, your key.
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. You can't go wrong. Folks, check out ericpetersautos.com. And,
and it's very interesting to Eric, because I think in many of these cases, you know, they do convince these people, like you talk about the air pollution thing.
They do convince these people that they're much larger problems than they actually are, whether it's because of a pinnacle of danger or systemically geographically.
Because, of course, the United States government controls such a large geographical area and it keeps adding to the things that it will control in that area,
that, of course, everybody's got to look to the central planners. Everybody's got to try to game
the system. If they just allowed the California people to handle their smog first, rather than
having the EPA get involved, then I think the only constitutional side from their constitutional framework for even any rationale for the EPA to exist would be if there were state on state conflict from pollution coming from one state going to another state.
But that's not really what we saw. We didn't see people in, say, New Mexico or in Nevada complaining about smog in the LA basin. We saw politicians in LA and other politicians
saying, look how terrible this is. We got to do something about this. We didn't see people
in one state saying our waters are being so polluted by this other state that we need an
entire national framework to control waters. If there was a conflict from, say, New Jersey and New York
with waters being polluted, then if they couldn't resolve it themselves, then based on what James
Madison said, then there would have been some sort of attempt by the Congress to resolve it
after the fact as a remedial way to do it, not a priori, you know?
Well, I agree with you, but let's go deeper down the rabbit hole. The superficial
explanation or justification that's trotted out about emissions is actually another MacGuffin.
What this really is at the end of the day is a half century old war on cars, which is a war
on mobility, and specifically on individual autonomous being able to go where you want to go
on your own schedule without being regimented and controlled. And they've used the regulatory state
and the excuse, well, we've got to control emissions. We've got to make cars get better
gas mileage. We've got to make cars safer. All of this was intentionally designed to throttle and
winnow down what cars could be
produced. And they had hoped that they were going to essentially extinguish car ownership that way,
but they miscalculated being incompetent because most bureaucrats are incompetent. These are
power lusting people. That's their expertise. That's what they know how to do.
And the auto industry remarkably managed to eliminate in any meaningful way, all of the actually harmful stuff that was coming out of the tailpipe.
They made cars immensely safe. They made them incredibly efficient.
So what now? Well, now, in order to continue this agenda, they have to frame them as being a threat to the planet.
And that's what the the core issue is behind this push to get electric vehicles out there because electric vehicles are just another step.
Electric vehicle is the vehicle to get most people out of cars, period.
That's what it's ultimately all about.
Yeah. Yeah. And the Biden administration was portrayed by the pop media people just a few days ago at the start of the week as having drawn back from some of its climate goals for cafe
standards, when in fact, all they did was allow possibly for a few more hybrids that they were
going to get rid of. I don't know if you want to comment on that, Eric. I do, actually. It's very
important because it's of a piece with what these authoritarians do. It's two steps forward, one
step back, but you're always going forward, aren't you?
You know, that's kind of the true meaning of their term progressive. That's really what that means.
You're constantly progressing towards more control and less freedom. So, you know, the pop media framed this as some kind of a defeat for these authoritarians. Oh, instead of having two thirds of the cars be entirely electric by 2032, as originally proposed, now half of that two thirds will be partially electric, i.e. hybrids.
But you see, the premise remains, you know, if you have to have partially electric vehicles, well then naturally you have to have electric vehicles, right?
You have to, you have to, you have to, being the operative words.
I mean, to be clear,
I've got nothing against hybrids per se, and I have nothing against electric vehicles per se.
If there's a market for that, and if manufacturers want to cater to that market,
by all means, I'm all for alternatives, free alternatives. What I'm opposed to
is this ramming of stuff down all of our throats, this one-size-fits-all-ism,
with the one-size-fits-all-ism with the one-size-fits-all
being determined by these incredibly arrogant, busybody people who think they've been put on
this earth to tell us all how we're going to live and what we're going to be allowed to have.
Well stated. And, you know, Eric, you make me think a little bit about about the moves by these politicians to do this sort of thing,
with EVs and all these other types of things,
these assumptions that they make in our lives.
It's akin to, I mentioned earlier in the program,
cultural Marxism on this Good Friday,
and how in one particular county,
the politicians were putting Trans transgender day ahead of Easter,
as I read from MRC TV and yeah, T.R., she's one of the writers there and she makes a great point about that.
But to me, you know, that's that's another manifestation in the long march.
You make me think about the progressivism, you know, two steps forward, one step back.
That is, you know, the Fabian socialist motif.
It's the turtle, very slow.
Generationally, they know they're going to get where they want to go slowly but surely.
And in a way, what we're seeing here with the automobile industry is its own version of cultural Marxism, where cultural
Marxism constantly has to come up with a new small protopon person or group that can be promoted
that the government can help. Splitting people away saying, yes, you now have another, you have
an enemy in the regular society, government will help you. And okay, now we've taken care of
this one and included new government plans for this one. We've got a new one. And they do the
same thing with the MacGuffins of the climate, with the MacGuffins of this is an emergency.
We've got to take care of this. So in a way, it's the same MO just with products rather than people,
rather than classes as they term them or different types of people that they split off. They've come up with a new thing that is, if you're against it, you're bad. In this sort of Fabian socialist, two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back, always finding something new, whether it's cultural Marxism with a new subgroup that needs to be promoted and government's got to help them
and play favorites with them, or it's a new particular industry that they want to establish
that they can control and they have their friends in there. Or an established industry that they're
going to manipulate. It seems to me that it's the same sort of MO. Do you see the same way?
I don't know. It may be different. know. And there's a common thread running through all of it, which is that the presumptions and the premises are almost never questioned.
And that's a sure recipe for losing the argument. You know, I mean, if you accept that there's a climate crisis, for example, if you even use the terminology without questioning it, well, you've already lost the debate, haven't you?
You know, you're just arguing about particulars. You really have to question things. I saw a great exchange the other day. It was between Senator Kennedy and some kid,
I don't remember, who's an Olympic skier. Did you see it? Yes, I got to see that. I think the Forbes
news people do a great job on it. I watched it on YouTube over there, I think. Yeah, and he
methodically took this kid apart, this kid who's a skier. He's an athlete. That's his expertise.
He knows how to ski. He looks like he's probably 22. Anyway he's an athlete that's his expertise he knows how to ski he looks like he's probably 22 anyway uh the point is that's his expertise he's a skier and they brought
this kid forth to testify about something he knows absolutely nothing about uh which is the science
behind climatology and and so on and kennedy just picked it apart bit by bit you know he he he asked
him essentially well do you know how much carbon dioxide there is in the Earth's atmosphere?
And the kid goes, a lot or so.
Yeah.
He has foundational basic knowledge, you know, of that simple fact.
How can you even talk about a subject like that when you aren't even aware of how much carbon dioxide there is in the Earth's atmosphere?
Right, right, exactly.
It's like talking about car design or an engine
when you have no idea what a carburetor does or even what it is. Yeah, and in a way, it translates
to talking about someone else's preferences when you're not that person. Yeah, it's astounding to
me. And there's also this lack of shame or just embarrassment there. If it had been me,
I would have said, okay, I really ought not to be here.
I'm sorry for wasting your time
and have excused myself and left the room.
I mean, most people don't like feeling like
or looking like an idiot in front of other people,
but apparently these people are so obtuse,
they don't even realize how they look to other people.
Obtuse, that's perfect.
That's absolutely perfect. That's absolutely perfect.
That's so true. And it's funny. Every once in a while I hear somebody use a term like, oh, I haven't used that for a while.
That is spot on. Yes.
And I think I think it's because they're that ideological.
You know, that's when you are in the grip of an ideology, which is kind of like a rabidized form of religion.
It's a it's a secular version of a religion in which is kind of like a rabidized form of religion. It's a, it's a secular version
of a religion in which you have a dogma and that dogma must be, must be projected and defended at
all costs. It's always outward. You can't receive anything. You're not, your mental processes now
are kind of jammed. You know, all you can do is enunciate to others what you have faith in and what you believe
in. And when you are faced with somebody who says, well, wait a minute, what about this?
This fact, this doesn't make sense to me because X, Y, and Z. Instead of being met with, well,
gosh, I never thought of that before. You have a valid point. It's met with this vociferous
moral outrage. You notice these people, it's not just
that they get angry, they get morally indignant, and they basically try to characterize you
as some kind of a cretin, a reprobate, for daring to question their ideology.
Absolutely. And I think a lesson that I might suggest to hearing this, if I were in front of the students, I would say, you know, that is the nature of the state.
It it it it it offers benefits to those who engage in projection of a narrative and because it's sending weapons to Israel or it's sending weapons to Ukraine or it's doing this or that for a particular economy or older people or whatever.
And it is it is amazing to see how oftentimes people I think who have their maybe they think their hearts are in the right places, they think they're doing right, are very willing to demonize people who just want to be left alone
because it translates into that, as you say, that obtuse, holier-than-thou approach, and people
don't even realize they're being holier-than-thou. They think they're doing the right thing. It's
really, it's very twisted when the political machinations get in and people forget
that the polis is force. Well, it's cultish behavior. And, you know, it used to be the
cults were sort of backwater aberrations, you know, like the Moonies and the Hare Krishnas and
people you'd see on the fringes of society. But that mindset has become quite common. Indeed,
it might even be pervasively common. We still see it to this day.
I rant a lot about the mask wearing. You still see that. It's like in defiance of all objective
reality and all of the facts about it, you still see people who are so weaponized by that cult
that they can't let it go even now. And they may never let it go.
And I think, absolutely. And that's, you know, that's,
that's one that's so manifest.
It's so obvious to people.
They just think that the size of a viral particle,
they just look at the side of the box or they listen to some friends,
but they still buy into this maybe out of fear,
you know,
number of other things that might be involved.
I don't know.
But it's the same sort of thing with the climate canard.
You know,
I was mentioning Al Gore was on with Jake Tapper just the other day, and they're going to be pushing more because it's April coming up and everybody knows Earth Day is coming.
Exactly. You know, and, you know, just like the guy who played the Indian in those old commercials from the government where he would look at the pollution and the tear would be going down.
His eye was actually like an Italian guy or something like that.
It's all it's all fake. It's all an artifice, you know, as much as I admired the
photography and the drama of those things, it was, it was an artifice.
But you know, again, to get to Al Gore, again, look at the religious manifestation of it.
This guy has been blathering on and on and on with his predictions about imminent doom,
you know, eschatologically, you know, like some kind of Old Testament prophet for what, the last 30 years? Right. He's been wrong.
Oh, I think we just lost you for a second. You know what? I've been wrong a lot of times.
Maybe I should rethink this. And worse, people, like you bring this guy out who's constantly in error, proven wrong.
Objectively, it's not an opinion.
He's wrong.
He's been wrong.
And they still listen to this guy.
Yeah, exactly.
And again, some of this comes from, as Hayek would have said, as we were discussing before, the information problem, which is that for maybe something like a mask, it might be a little easier for people to get that information.
You can look at the side of the box, right?
Oh, I see.
It says not protected against COVID-19.
You can think it through, you know.
But when you're constantly given a series of these MacGuffins and a series of lies in that conversation with tapper tapper listed off right at the start
four or five things utterly false completely false about oh we've had more and more dainty
more destructive storms than ever false false false the hottest hottest year on record 2023
again patently proven false you know and he says these things and then gore of course just uses
that as a diving board to jump in like a whale into the into the sea you know he's jumping in
he's like well yeah well you know if if we do that and we also uh stop swearing on records from
40 years ago the world will be perfect and i'm the guy. It's just utterly absurd. It's so ridiculous.
But I think it goes to that information problem. The information problem, it has something to do
with the 24-7 news cycle now. Back in the day when you had three networks, and I'm not advocating
for this, I'm just pointing out something. You had three networks and they broadcast during the
daytime. Remember when the TV would be off in the morning when you'd get up, if you got up early at five o'clock in the
morning or whatever, and you turn it on and it would just be the, you know, the bars and then
it would turn on. Well, now they've got to fill up all this airtime, don't they? And it's all
these networks. And so if it bleeds, it leads. And so they constantly are trying to, to push
the fear button, the panic button, because that
gets people agitated. And agitated people are going to watch, listen, and read. And that dovetails
with the wants and desires of the government and the corporations who want us to be terrified of
everything. Ask your doctor about Namemba. Do you have restless legs? It's one thing after the next. It's some awfulness
that's going on over here. You're going to die if you don't take this drug. And so they keep
everybody in a state of perpetual anxiety and panic. And people, as H.L. Lincoln put out,
who are in a state of panic, our desire is to be led to safety, right? Air fingers close,
safety. And that's what this is all about. Yes, perfectly stated. And of course, that, you know, honestly, that goes, I mentioned yesterday, the fallacies inherent in John Locke's so-called natural rights theory, which was really social contract theory, claiming that you signed a contract to form a government for your protection. It's inherent in the argument about the state itself. Where did I sign the contract? Yeah. Where is that? I didn't see that. And how much is my protection? I might have a differing
opinion from the other person who's being forced to pay for it. So it's unworkable, of course.
And one of the things, and I'd love to mention this from your site, today you published a piece
about disposability. And I think there are a lot of ties that go into the idea of things have to be
put aside, new developments have to come around. Can you tell us about this piece over at Eric
Peters Auto's, Eric, your new piece, Embracing Disposability? Yeah, it's just about the gratuitous
wastefulness that has come to characterize a great deal of our culture and
our society. And I focus on the replacing of the physical key that people used to have that would
unlock the door to your car and start the engine with these hyper elaborate electronic key fobs
that have perhaps given you a slight convenience, but a tremendous cost and waste. You know, if you have a physical key and you lose it, well, you can get another one cut for 10 bucks in any hardware store.
Even today, you lose the key fob. And in some cases, you're looking at several hundred dollars to get a new electronic fob because it's electronic and it's inherently more fragile.
And these things are all now no longer discrete systems.
And what I mean by that is in the olden days, when you had a key that you put into the door lock, the lock.
Placing or fixing that lock now, it's integrated with electronics that are connected to a computer.
So, for example, when you push that start button on the dashboard of your car that's not starting the
engine the signal's being sent to the computer and then the computer says okay turn the starter motor
and that's all fine when it works but then when it doesn't now you've got this expensive problem
with these electronic parts that by and large are not repairable you throw them away and this is
just characteristic in my opinion this wastefulness you're not really getting anything
meaningful you know in exchange for all of this uh what you're doing is increasing the cost of
the vehicle you're decreasing its durability i've got a i've got a 50 year old car out in the garage
i still have the original ignition key for it it still works as well as it did about 50 years ago
right right yeah it's just i object to this and i think it I think it's a corruption that has occurred, ironically enough,
as a result of our affluence, because we've taken things for granted and we have to indulge
ourselves in gimmicky things and gadgets. Ooh, look at that. Look, it's got a touchscreen. It
blinks and it beeps and it does this and it does that. Earlier generations in particular,
people who lived through really hard times
like the depression in this country,
they learned a really valuable lesson
about not being bedazzled by gimmicky things
and not wasting things.
They were very frugal people, that generation,
because they learned a hard lesson.
And I have a feeling we're going to learn that lesson again.
And I know that you and I spoke,
we're speaking with Eric Peters, folks. It's
ericpetersautos.com. You can follow him on X as at libertariancarg, at libertariancarg. Check out
ericpetersautos.com if you're a gearhead, if you're interested in your individual liberty,
the freedom of movement, and also these observations about these trends. We mentioned this,
we discussed this once before, Eric, about this idea of the greater the complexity, the less
incentive there is for the person who's using it to actually find out how it works. And as you say,
oftentimes complexity comes with efficiency and productivity, productivity gains being great, being able to refine a system down to something that with computers can be done very easily and so on and so forth.
But when there is a screw up, you also people should try to remember that they're they're now working with a complex system that will be very difficult for them or even just a couple of their friends to be able to handle.
Whereas with less
complex systems, they're a lot easier to manage and understand the gears. Well, a really interesting
thing to me is that we reached, I believe, a kind of apotheosis in the late 90s, even mid-90s,
in terms of electronic controls improving the durability, the efficiency, and the reliability
of vehicles. You had throttle body and port fuel
injection came along around those times. You had electronically controlled transmissions with
overdrives. Phenomenal, phenomenal things that resulted in vehicles that will run reliably for
200,000, 250,000 miles with minimal upkeep. But instead of saying, you know, now we should focus
on making vehicles lighter and we should focus on making them even more efficient to the extent
that we can by various means. Instead of doing that, what they did was, well, let's add a touchscreen.
Let's figure out a way to dazzle them with some gimmick or gadget that doesn't meaningfully
improve the vehicle, as far as I can tell, in any functional sense. It just makes it more expensive,
more failure prone, and more of a throwaway.
You know, people buy these new cars with these big, gigantic touchscreens in them that control everything now in a lot of cases.
You know, like that woman, I forgot her name, Chow, the rich relation of Mitch McConnell who backed her Tesla.
Oh, yes, yes, Elaine Chow.
The entire car is controlled by a gigantic touchscreen, this Tesla.
So, like, if you want to put the thing into reverse, you tap a button, reverse, on the screen, and then tap drive.
Well, if anybody uses a cell phone knows there's no tactile feedback, and you often make a mistake, right?
Yes. You meant to tap B, or instead you got T or something like that.
Well, that can have bad consequences when you're driving a vehicle.
Yeah. of bad consequences when you're driving a vehicle yeah and i i pull the shifter oh sorry drive and
feel it engage you know the motion that the motion of it is kind of intuitive you know forward and
back and back and forward and all of that well you don't have that with that with these with
the touch type kinds of things and so you know sometimes disasters happen but down the road what
happens is that eventually that thing is going to go dark it's going to fritz out and you've got all
the controls for everything not just what gear you're in but the climate
control the stereo is embedded in this touchscreen how long does your smartphone last how many people
are walking around uh with a 10 year old smartphone these days not many because it fritzes
out you throw it away you get another one so what happens when your 10 year old car smartphone
fritzes out on you after 10 years and you can't get replacement parts for it anymore because nobody makes them?
You know, you throw the car away.
And perhaps, you know, to introduce this too, you know, there's maybe two or more levels of the concept of autonomy, Eric.
I probably, you know, not telling you anything new where you got the autonomy of the individual.
I go all the way back to, you know, driving telling you anything new where you get the autonomy of the individual. I go all the
way back to, you know, driving a stick shift. You know, you could pop the clutch on that thing.
If you couldn't get it started, get somebody pushing you down a hill and you get it going,
you know, you get the things rolling. And we did it many times. Got a nice little hill out in front
of the house here. I was like, okay, we're going to do it. And, but then there's the autonomy of the individual when it comes to these electronics
and the possibility of government or regulatory or corporate interference. And that gets us to
the whole arguments that you've offered in great, great succinct pieces about this idea of the speed
controllers on the federal level. Andomas massey tried to stop that when
when are those going to come in 2026 they're going to impose those oh they're already here
they haven't been formally imposed yet but they're already here they've been here for a number of
years most new cars that have been made since i don't know roughly about five years ago have what
they call advanced driver assistance technology adas that's the an acronym i've never met anybody
who actually wanted this
stuff and checked off an options box and said, yeah, I'd like to have speed limit control. I'd
like to have lane keep assist, automated emergency braking, and all of these technologies. And you
got to wonder, well, why are all the manufacturers, and I mean all of them, why are they embedding
this technology into their vehicles? And it's because they're anticipating the regulatory apparat making it mandatory. So we just heard recently,
you know, this predates Biden, by the way. But the thing is, you know, the Biden regime
with the 2026 model years, they're going to have this electronic capacity to shut down a car
remotely. Or if you drive in a manner that is
outside of the acceptable parameters as determined by whoever programs the vehicle, then the car will
disable itself and pull off to the side of the road. Well, this stuff is being incrementally
already put into vehicles. It's already in most vehicles. Unbelievable. You know, you make me
think of the streets of India, and perhaps i'd prefer the chaos
of those little three-wheeled uh scooter things yeah it's uh it's it's incredible i'm gonna be
going around on a motorcycle i remember many years ago i dreamt that i had a motorcycle
and it wasn't legal anymore and i was hiding it in my garage. And, you know, I was going around on an old dirt bike,
like a, you know, a Kawasaki or something like that. And hopefully we won't get to those days.
Oh, there's not a push for that. You know, if this is not arrested, it is, to me,
logically inevitable. If you accept the premise, getting back to what I was talking about earlier,
that cars, in order for them to be safe, have got to have the advanced assistance technology. Well, then how is it that
we can allow vehicles that aren't safe, that don't have that technology on public roads?
You know, they've tried this in the past. They've tried to outlaw older vehicles by saying, well,
they don't have airbags. They don't have even seatbelts. If you go back to vehicles that were
made before about 1965, I think, they didn't have factory seatbelts. Oh, we can't have those on the road.
They're not safe. Well, the old car hobby fought back and squelched that, but now we're going to
do it again. Because a lot of people are already saying, you know what? I don't want any part of
this. I don't want a big brother, creepy connected car that's knocking me out to my insurance company
and that is going to cut the throttle or apply the brakes when it thinks that I'm not driving in a manner that's acceptable.
So I'm going to cling to my older vehicle. Well, how's the government going to deal with that?
You think they're going to let people cling to their older vehicles that aren't big brothery and connected? Probably not.
Eric, I'm curious about your thoughts on this, because at the time, I thought this was part of the agenda.
You know, the government mandates can serve multiple agendas, of course, and some of those don't get revealed for quite a while.
But when they did the cash for clunkers thing under Obama, I was telling my girlfriend at the time, I said, you know, this is clearly, they want to knock out some of those older cars that don't have the driver's
assist, the satellite connections,
the boxes in them that you can just fix up. There's, you know, it was,
it was,
I think as bad or worse than the idea of paying farmers to kill their pigs
during the depression, you know? Did you, did you see it the same way? Do you think that was part of their agenda?
It wasn't seeing, it was. It's actually even worse
than the business with the killing of the pigs that FDR did back during the New Deal era.
Notice the psychological tactics. They framed
these perfectly operable cars that just happen to be older cars
as clunkers. You don't want to be
driving a clunker, do you? Right? So that was the first step, implying that the cars are not fit to
be driven, that they're somehow unsafe, that that's a problem and we have to fix the problem.
Well, what they wanted to do was specifically to get rid of affordable used cars.
And particularly because that would drive
the young first time buyer out of the market for cars.
And they understand that the car industry
depends on young people coming up,
getting their driver's license, getting into cars,
not just literally getting into, but liking them.
Hey, this is my first car.
Remember how excited we were when we got our first car? got our driver's license yeah kids start tinkering with
them it's great they can't afford them and one of the reasons they can't afford them is because
they've been destroyed most of them yeah you know you can't pick up a decent car anymore for 500
bucks like you and i did back in the day right that's what this clunkers thing was all about
and then they used this awful language. They talked about stimulating.
You know, they love that word.
Stimulating demand for new cars.
That was the surface reason given.
So, yeah, okay, we're going to just gratuitously destroy things.
I mean, it was upsetting to me to watch.
You may have seen some of those videos at the time.
They would say, here's this car.
It runs just fine.
And they would pour silica, you know,
into the engine of this running car to lock the engine up,
to destroy the engine.
It wasn't enough that they, you know,
that they took the car to a junkyard.
They had to actually destroy every bit of it
so that nobody could come into the junkyard
who needed an engine, let's say,
or spare parts to fix their other car.
They had to gratuitously destroy these vehicles.
It's amazing.
It's amazing. The destruction of it. I mean, it's such a visual and physical manifestation of government destroying
our options and our choices and our lives in so many ways. And that is a perfect, that epitomizes
it. And it's just, it's amazing that people could sign up to that and they would go along with it
across all of the United States States that they would do this.
And the governor's going to get money in front of people.
Yeah, that's how the government corrupts people by by offering them a bribe.
Hey, we'll pay you. What was it? I think they paid, what, forty five hundred bucks or five thousand bucks.
We'll give you five thousand dollars, you know, to throw away this vehicle.
OK, sign me up.
Five grand.
Yeah, I'll take it.
That's how it works.
Yeah.
And obviously with firearms buybacks, it's a little bit easier to construct a gun than it is an automobile and to keep it hidden. And so with these automobiles now, if people want to do something, they'll have to get them from Mexico or some other place where they might've been constructed that might've been
older. And, you know, an entire generation of cars now just destroyed. It's insane.
Eric, I'd like to- It's not insane if your goal is
winnow down transportation, you know, and that's important. You know, it's important to understand the why, because otherwise it's inexplicable.
You shake your head and go, well, why would they do this?
It's perverse.
Well, it's not perverse when you understand the maliciousness of the motives.
But that's absolutely right.
Absolutely right.
And, you know, people might think that, oh, Eric's being too harsh or Gardner's being too harsh or David Knight, if he speaks about this, if he is critical of these policies.
No, this is malicious, as you say, it is malicious and it's couched in, you know, it's as I mentioned for an MRC TV video, it's the iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove is what it is. You know, they put all these trappings of words and phraseology around it, but really what it is, is it's fascism and it's, and it's for a
particularly even worse goal to have even more control over us. Yeah. And don't take my word
for it. Read their own documents, read their own statements. You know, they've come out of the
closet now and they're very plain and forthright about how they want to limit, if not eliminate,
personal car ownership and driving by, you know, 2040 or whatever their end goal is.
It's insane. It's, well, at least they'll have government run vehicles like EV police cars and
EV ambulances to chase after the bad guys. You know, except they won't.
That's the other aspect of this.
Just like John Kerry is not going to be flying coach commercially anytime soon,
you're not going to see the leadership cadre of the American Soviet Union going around in EVs.
You're going to see them being ferried around in their 6,000 pound armored plate glass windowed V8 SUVs,
just like Stalin was back in the day. The Politburo members had the best cars
and everybody else had the Yugos. Yep. Yes. So true. It's absolutely true. Eric, I wanted to
show the audience of the David Knight show here. I'm Gardner Goldsmith filling in for David Knight.
Our guest is Eric Peters of ericpetersautos.com.
ericpetersautos.com.
Check him out.
See the great articles on politics,
on the nexus, unfortunate nexus,
between politics and your choices in the market,
your ability to travel.
And look in his store.
It's a very cool store.
You'll see his great and very witty products there.
Eric, if I could get your comments on this piece from yesterday, Elections Matter. Tell people
about that one, if you would, kind sir. Well, let's preface this because this is something you
and I often talk about. And it's the dilemma that libertarians, principled people face about
participating in elections. It's such a nasty
business to be involved in this thing and to be pigeonholed into this choice, in Airfinger's
quotes, between evil and somewhat less evil. And there's an argument, which it resonates with me,
I get it, that by voting, you're helping to legitimize the system. And that's certainly
true. But I do think there's an element of duress involved in elections. And in that case, you're entitled to act defensively.
And so voting to counteract your neighbor who's voting to take away your liberty, I don't see
that as a morally bad thing. And I don't think that by doing that, you're somehow endorsing
whatever evil this politician is going to do. Now, the piece focuses on what's been
happening in Virginia, which is where I live. Right, with Glenn Youngkin being elected over
there. Yes, the Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected rather than Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton
apparatchik. Really important, and it shows that elections do matter because there were 30-something
bills that were put forward by the General Assembly, which is controlled completely by the Democrats, that is the leftists,
that would have all but completely criminalized most gun ownership, most gun buying in the state
of Virginia. Northam vetoed 30 of those bills. So ipso facto, it seems to me elections do matter.
That's not a small thing. It's an important thing. And it doesn't mean that at
the same time, you can't hope for something better. You know, I understand that Glenn
Youngkin is not Thomas Jefferson, but he's also not Joseph Stalin. You know, I'd like to have
somebody who's at least somewhat closer to Thomas Jefferson than Joseph Stalin.
And I think that that scales. And that's essentially what the piece is all about.
Yeah, you mentioned here, subjecting anyone's rights to a vote every so often is like having them live at the foot of a leaky dam, leaving them in perpetual dread that tomorrow will be the day the dam bursts and washes away their life along with everything they've spent their life, their life working for.
No one should ever be put in this position.
More finally, no one should ever be in the position of having the legal power to vote to have the state take away anything from anyone nor control him a priori in any way.
Meaning leave him be unless he's actually done something that resulted in a tangible harm to another person. And then you go into a little more explanation there,
because I think it's important.
It's good that you provide that context
as you explain what you're seeing
practically on the ground there.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, voting as such in the context that we live in,
it really is, when you think about it,
it's a macabre kind of a thing.
And it's something that enables people who on their own probably
would be ashamed if, if not afraid to go over to their next door neighbor, let's say fingering a
pistol and saying, give me money. Or, you know, you're going to take that, that bush out of your
front yard because I don't like it. Most people wouldn't do that because most people aren't psychopaths, you know,
but somehow it is, it enables psychopathy writ large. You go to the, you go to vote for somebody
who's going to do this awful dirty business for you, you know, that you're going to somehow
benefit from. And then on the alternative side, there's people who hate all of this stuff and who
vote defensively, who go there in the hopes that, well, maybe at least I can minimize the damage. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. You know,
you're trying to minimize the damage that's being done to you. And again, you're under duress. It's
not like you don't, you have the choice really realistically to opt out and say, well, no,
I'm not going to participate in this. That's fine, but you can, it's going to be done to you
regardless. That's the bottom line. Yeah. And it's going to be done to you regardless. That's the bottom line.
Yeah. It's, and it's such a difficult thing to consider when entering into that sphere to say,
okay, I think I'm going to make that decision. Or if one does this hypothetically, because you never know what the politician's going to encounter in the future. So can you reliably,
you know, you're, you're really taking a leap
of faith in a way for this person's integrity and that he or she will act on what he promised
to say, I'm going to try to reduce the burden of the state. You look at people like Thomas Massey
or Ron Paul or, you know, my friend Glenn down, Glenn Jacobs down in Tennessee in Knox County.
And you say, OK, you know, a lot of people in the Free State Project,
you know, there are differing opinions
between the pure voluntarist anarchists
and the people who say, no,
we're going to try to participate
in the state of New Hampshire.
And they've done some good things.
They've been able to open up the ability
for people to use medical marijuana
and then to get marijuana decriminalized.
They've opened up things about the Respect the Guard Act and things like that. So it is interesting and everybody's
subjective viewpoints are obviously going to be played upon and they might permutate and they
have differing opinions from everybody. But that core nugget of it, of the state is that great
entity of force and coercion,
can't be avoided. And I think it's very interesting when you look at that Young and
McCullough battle, because the people in Virginia are, the ones that I know, are so pleased that
they don't have Terry McCullough. That's what I'll say. Yeah. I think a good way to look at this,
you know, to kind of deal with the creepy feeling that a lot of us have about participating,
you know, about voting. Imagine that you're a slave. You're a slave. Okay. Your property,
you're owned, you're on a slave plantation. And the master says, well, you can work in the house
or you can work in the field. Okay. So as a slave, I think it'd be better to work in
the house if I'm going to have to be asleep. But does it mean that you can't in your own head
be thinking about, okay, when I have the opportunity, I'm going to get out of this place.
I'm going to take off. So is there an incongruity there? In the moment you're under duress and you
have this option to better yourself within that system somewhat, it doesn't mean you're precluding the possibility of escaping. And it
doesn't mean that you sanction your own slavery. It means you're doing what you have to do to
survive in a situation in which you've been put under duress. Well, I hope people will check out
the piece, Eric, because you put a lot of thought into this and, you know, you take it from the ground in Virginia.
You look at the ramifications of what would have happened if Terry McAuliffe, who's just amazingly unscrupulous person, if he were to have gotten in there.
And the people in Virginia have suffered so much under their prior governor that hopefully some things are going to change.
I know a lot of people who live in Virginia, obviously, as probably you do. And it's really stunning to see that so many important
factors of their lives are influenced by the state. I often challenge people. I say, when you're
driving along, look out the window of the car sometime and just see if you can see anything
that's not touched by the hands of the political system. And, you know, it's not good.
That's for sure.
Hey, why don't we talk also just real quick about if people want to head over to ericpetersautos.com about your Rumble channel and the videos that you put up there.
Yeah, sure.
I think it's under EP Autos.
I'm embarrassed to say that I don't really know what my own title is over at Rumble. But I went over to Rumble because I had been on YouTube for a number of years. But then I got deep monetized and deep platform because I posted wrong, thankful things. This happened to so many people. So I made the shift little monologues. I've got this cheesy, really cheesy little camera thing that I use.
And I take it with me when I go for a drive, whether it's in my truck, my Trans Am, or one of the new cars that I test drive.
And I just like to ramble and monologue about things that I think maybe might be of interest to people and might get a conversation going.
So there's a lot of that stuff up on the Rumble channel if you'd like to take a look at it.
And also over at your website, I want to show the store where
I've got the black and white
Baa cap, and
I wear that often when I'm driving,
and I'm very happy about that.
You can see the safety
t-shirt and the Keeve
t-shirt. You know, I think we're going to have to make
a Haiti t-shirt now.
Yes. Well, they're
making their plans about Haiti, aren't they?
Absolutely.
There's always another one.
Absolutely.
And it's interesting
because on Redacted,
probably maybe six
or five months ago,
they were like,
yeah, watch Haiti.
They're going to do something
in Haiti.
And sure enough, they did.
And they're going to do more,
unfortunately.
Eric, so great to have you here.
I really appreciate you being here.
I want to, before you being here i want to
before you go i neglected to go into rockfin and rumble chat to just check up and see if anybody
had any questions for jacob and i'd love to do that with you absolutely so over at rumble and
rockfin chat first i want to thank uh let's see we had someone who contributed michelle obama and
said dig the cardinal look but let's not go Pope.
Okay.
Cause I've got the red.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
It's my Star Trek red shirt.
Look, I guess.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
That's really nice.
And of course, anybody wants to contribute, everything goes to towards David's show today
and drop your comments and questions inside chat if you want to.
And then we've got, and i didn't even get
to talk to you about the epstein bridge where um they're now you know that's from tony arterburn
mentioned epstein jeffrey epstein dying the lack of information yeah suddenly the black box isn't
functioning the way the black box is supposed to function i don't know what it means you know i
have a thought on that actually yeah it's worth anything because i really know next to nothing
about maritime stuff but i wonder the thought that immediately occurred to
me is whether these big ships are kind of like cars are now, meaning that they're not directly
mechanically controlled anymore. So that when the power shut off, the guy who was in the pilot house
or whatever they call it, who was trying to steer the ship, he would put inputs into his toggle or
whatever, but that wouldn't be translated into the appropriate motion to the rudder because it's not
mechanical anymore. It's drive by wire. So that might explain it, but I don't know.
Oh, that's very interesting. That is very, that's, that's key. Oh, wow. And, you know,
Eric, it's, it's fascinating to me to see this sort of thing, because, again, you know, it reveals incredible lessons.
You know, it's difficult because the first blush, people lost their lives.
People were killed and people tried to really act to stop this.
But then there are the ramifications of the supply chain and all that things and all that.
And but there are lessons we can get out of this.
And I'm curious to be interested to find out.
I'm sure it will take someone with much more greater investigatory powers to be able to investigate the way those ships work than I have.
But maybe things, you know, maybe some people will be interested in this.
I was amazed when David had the other the other day, David was able to he had found that YouTube channel where a man actually devotes most of its channel to maritime interests and navigation.
He had the satellite stuff up there and he was right on it.
I didn't see any network news people doing that.
That's that guy's particular interest, the particular area.
Yeah, it's nice.
There's a broader point too here, which I think everybody's noticed, which is it's like everything's falling apart.
Airplanes are falling apart, brand new airplanes.
The door falls off the thing while it's up in the air, the ship crashes into
the bridge, nothing works. It's like Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged is literally coming true
right before our very eyes. Everything is falling apart because competence no longer matters.
You're right. Absolutely right. And the more we get a fascist system, it'll be more politics
that matters more and more.
Well, Eric, thanks so much. It's a pleasure. It's my last couple of minutes here filling
in for David, and I'm glad I get to spend it with you and the audience. And particularly for you,
I want to thank you for all your great, great work. And I really appreciate it, Eric. I'd love
to get you back on Liberty Conspiracy as soon as possible. We've got to do the Mind Meld again
soon. Yes. Yes. So do the Mind Meld again soon.
Yes. Yes. We'll do the Mind Meld, the Vulcan Mind Meld, and we'll watch more car chase stuff.
That was so much fun watching the Seven Elves car chase. That was great.
And I've got some other ones for you, obscure ones you may not be aware of. I'm not going to talk about it now. I'll send it to you privately and we can talk about it on the next show.
All right. All right. That sounds great. Eric, thank you. You do yeoman's work. If I had my BAA cap on, I would, I would take off my cap to you right now. Thanks, Gord.
All right, Eric. Eric Peters, ericpetersautos.com, everybody. Remember the website. He is a
phenomenal guy. Thank you all. As we head towards the last couple of minutes here in the David
Knight show. Thank you all inside the Rockfin chat. Didn't
get to really chat too much with you today, but Chuck Finley, thank you for being there.
Michelle Obama, thank you again for your contribution. Stephen Casper, thank you,
thank you. He says, people better wake the H up or we will lose our freedoms. What's left of them,
I would add that, Stephen, 100%. Great power to you. Brian Demicartney, have a blessed Resurrection Sunday. Couldn't have said it
better. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Really appreciate that.
And then we've got this over here. Oh, I want to get this comment
in here from Solocat1980. Did the immigrant workers filling
the potholes on the bridge not understand the warning
to get off the bridge because they didn't
care to learn English. Well, I understand the sarcasm there. I'll leave it at that.
Over on Rumble, Junior Barner, I think I'm reading it right. God bless everyone. Enjoy
the weekend with your family and friends. Absolutely. M. Seller says he is risen indeed.
Isn't that great?
What a beautiful day.
Like I said, I heard the birds this morning.
I know David's going to be enjoying the day with his family.
I hope you enjoy it.
Love to you all.
Thank you so much.
Again, if you want to join me tonight, Liberty Conspiracy,
I've got to switch studios tonight, but it should be going on at 6 o'clock tonight.
If anything happens, I'll try to get the word out. I have to go to another town, take care of my brother's cats this evening.
So there's a bunch of stuff that I have to do before that.
So hopefully I'll be able to have enough time to prepare, bring the tech with me and get it all set up in my Russian studio somewhere in the deep woods of Siberia to provide the Russian propaganda.
So in the meantime, thanks for listening to this awesome, incredible Russian propaganda here on The David Knight Show.
And thanks to David, to Travis, to everyone in the audience.
What a splendid, splendid day.
Happy Easter early.
Thank you so much.
Resurrection Day indeed.
And of course, I leave you and say farewell by bringing this in.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Remember, go to TheDavidKnightShow.com.
Enjoy the weekend.
Take care.
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